That must have been a really cold night if the station attendant also froze to death…
Uh…use the obvious clues that somehow got overlooked to try and find the actual killer before the authorities catch up with you?
What the fuck do you think you do? Call 911.
I can tell you this much. Some of the responses here definitely fall outside of what would be considered “normal”. At that’s a pretty good way of getting some additional unwanted scrutiny from the police.
Yeah, the only one murdered here was the English language.
May I be rude enough to suggest that if DNA testing ordered way back in 2008 has not cleared her yet, then perhaps it showed that she really does deserve to be on death row after all?
Perhaps I should have explained the circumstances. The body was in the East River in a section that’s called Hell Gate where the currents go every which way. They brought in a helicopter and boats and divers, and between the currents and the helicopter blades and everything else churning up the water and the fact that it was dusk by then…well, they lost the body.
None of this was reported on the news, which was a bit odd given that it was a huge commotion with the helicopter and police cars and fire trucks. They even shut down the FDR for a while! (that’s the main highway that goes up the east side of Manhattan.) There was one youtube video up for a while.
I think you missed a few episodes there.
Legacy, Season 7, the guy walking his dog who finds the body is a hit man. There was a separate murder within, where the guy “found” his buddy had fallen off a hill and hit his head, but it turned out he had murdered him.
I think Payback, S14 was similar.
I think there were a few more - these are just off the top of my head. But you’re right, it usually isn’t the finder.
I’m so sorry for your loss, and that it happened that way. If it makes you feel any better, many (all?) states require that a person who is *not *in hospice care have Emergency Services (911) called if they die at home. If they’re in hospice, their death is considered expected, and their doctor will sign the death certificate without an examination (as your dad’s doctor did), so there’s no need for the coroner’s office. But if they’re not in hospice, any death at home is investigated, even if the other people in the home aren’t particularly surprised by the death. In hospice means you call the funeral home; out of hospice means you call 911, and that means EMS and police and drama and, if they lived in a state that doesn’t allow EMS to pronounce death, they have to go to the ER, even if they’re no longer alive.
This is one of the reason I try to get people enrolled in home hospice instead of home health care if it looks close to the end. No one should have to endure that kind of circus at such a stressful time. 
Naw, if they the attendant is complaining they’ve frozen to death they haven’t, actually, frozen. 
Pardon the awkward phrasing.
If you come across a dead body but are worried that you will be arrested for murder, pull out you gun and shoot it a few times. This will distinguish you from the actual killer, so you won’t be arrested for murder, and all you have to do to walk on the charge of committing an indignity to a dead body is to claim that you feared for your life when it lay there in front of you.
Well clearly some posters are not going to have their minds changed by reason or logic, so it’s pointless to argue about it, but the only intelligent thing to do if you come upon an unresponsive person is to call 911.
I would have no fear of calling to report a possibly deceased person. It’s not up to me to determine whether they’re dead or not. And if they’re not dead but could be saved by medical intervention it would be a cold hearted thing to do to walk off.
I am an active member of my community. I want my community – my city and neighborhood – to be a civilized, safe place to live. The police are my allies in this, not my enemies.
Dead bodies are found all the time in my city of 180,000. Found by passers by. Found in the street, in the woods, floating down the river, in their homes. I’ve never heard of the happenstance discoverer of a body being arrested for murder. The only reason I can think of to walk away from a dead body and not report it is if you had something to do with the death.
This ^ 100%.
LOL You’d be a kick to be around after the bars close, going home would take you hours.
Yes 911…Yes its me…again…yes I found another one, corner of 5th and 4th…well he might be dead, no wait I think he just farted, do corpses fart?
Yes.
Actually, they do. Dead bodies make a bunch of different sounds from gases and liquids building up, shifting and releasing. It’s kind of gross.
As for the contention that calling 911 is the only “intelligent thing” to do, that presumes that interactions with the police are a safe thing for everyone. We know this to be patently untrue. We know that certain people, in certain communities and of certain ethnic, religious and sexuality groups are not well treated by police even in situations where they are not breaking any known law whatsoever. In a situation where a crime may have been committed, there are huge swaths of the American public who very reasonably have no faith that calling the police will end well for them. And if they chose to walk away from a body, presuming that it wasn’t in their own home, and let someone else deal with it, they would be entirely in the right. It’s not incumbent upon anyone to put themselves in harm’s way for a corpse.
I am not a big fan of blind trust in the police, but I would not worry about calling 911 if I found a body while out walking or something similar. I agree with the people who don’t think getting railroaded for finding someone dead is an actual risk, and would like an example of a case that looks like that before worrying about being blamed. It’s also likely that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a passed out person and dead person, since I’m not going to walk up and poke the body, so calling 911 also increases the chance of the person surviving if they’re just passed out.
In the OP’s hypothetical based on the game, I wouldn’t do what the protagonist did in the spoiler, and if I did then I would call a lawyer once I found the body because something weird is going on and I’ve gotten myself mixed up in it in a way that could land me in trouble.
I doubt the paranoid responses in this thread are all coming from Black Muslim Transsexuals. The SDMB demographic tends a bit more comfortable.
I’d call 911.
As a black Jewish trans person I’m not sure if this was meant to be a veiled insult or a joke. Either way it missed the mark. Only one of those factors is – as news report after news report will bear out – enough to turn police from protectors into killers. Layer those factors and avoiding police becomes as realistic a survival strategy as avoiding criminals.
The “paranoid” responses here may be actual paranoia from the people making them. That doesn’t mean that the worry of police misdeeds is moot for everyone. But maybe I’m still reeling from the cop screaming profanities in my elderly (not Jewish, not transgender) mother’s face when she called to report a stolen car abandoned and parked largely in our front yard.
So, it is starting to appear that the consensus is NOT to take the body home where you can perform your experiments in private…
One of the few times my sister was extremely angry with me was when she thought that I had brought a body home on her wedding day. No, I am not making this up.
My sister was in town to get married. While she was preparing, an unmarked van arrived from the place I worked at, and a couple of guys and I brought a large cardboard crate into the living room. How large? Just the perfect size for a basic casket sans fittings. My sister knew that I worked at a funeral home, and put two and two together to come with five. She assumed that it was a body from work, and was more than a little pissed off.
Of course it wasn’t a body. It was flowers for the wedding party and our home. The guys in the van then dropped of more crates of flowers at the church and the club at which the reception was to be held.
Being from out of town, what my sister didn’t realize was that the funeral home also had a flower shop business and used the same van for both body pickup and flower delivery.
Things went downhill from there, for the limo that took her to her hair-dresser appointment got lost on the way home in a blizzard and we had to send out cars looking for her (and a couple of guests who flew in from Saudi Arabia to northern Ontario got stopped overnight in their car a few miles out of town). At the reception’s dance, the groom’s family spent the entire evening sitting in a separate room due to religious reasons. Within a year, the church burned down. After a few years, she got divorced. Gotta love weddings.
Anyway, yes, occasionally a body will fart when you move it, and yes, on occasion you need be concerned about other people thinking that you are taking a body home.
Because you have to talk to the police, and rule number one of talking to the police is “have your lawyer present”. Why do you find seeking legal counsel “a bizarre approach” or suspicious? It is, and should always be, SOP when dealing with the legal system in any capacity. If you don’t have a lawyer? Call one. I would make sure my lawyer knew even if I called an anonymous tip line.
Police are suspicious of everyone who isn’t a cop. You were at the scene of a crime and so now your DNA is, too. Catching murderers is hard, so I would expect them to take the easiest approach with a probability of success. That could very well mean making me a suspect and using my presence at the crime scene as evidence.