5 Mistakes That Went Unnoticed For An Absurd Amount of Time

5

Authorities Will Walk Right Past Dead Bodies For Days, Weeks, Or Even Years

The public pool is essentially a communal toilet that children will splash in your face, but there are definite limits as to what should be allowed to go in that giant bacterial margarita. One 2011 Sunday, Marie Joseph went to a public pool in Fall River, Massachusetts. After she went down the water slide, the nine-year-old neighbor she was chaperoning told lifeguards that he never saw her come up again. And those super responsible lifeguards hopped right on top of doing both jack and shit about it.

It was Tuesday evening when someone finally foundall day Monday and Tuesday, with six lifeguards serving during that time. Health inspectors also came to check out the pool on both Monday and Tuesday to assess the water quality. No one saw her body. She was only discovered Tuesday evening when some teenagers hopped the fence and saw her floating.

 Joseph's body in the pool, which had been open

And this isn't the only instance of city employees grossly dropping the ball when it comes to errant corpses. In December 2017, a man was shot in his van in Tennessee. Likely this was inconvenient for him, and police were kind enough to show up and ensure he got to the hospital. His van was impounded, because, you know, the guy who owned it was shot.

Seven weeks later, the man got out of the hospital and went to pick up his vehicle. And that's when he discovered a dead dude in the back. A dude who had been shot at the same time as the driver and died, still in the back of the van, where he'd been completely ignored by everyone.

It's possible this is part of the human tendency to want to keep the status quo. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," as they say. And if it is broke, as long as the bills are paid, then just crack a window and it won't matter. Like the case of Pia Farrenkopf, whose body was discovered mummified in the backseat of her own car six goddamned years after she died. The car was parked in her own garage.

Farrenkopf had the misfortune to be one of those people who doesn't like dealing with other people's bullshit, so those around her could go years at a time without hearing from her. All of her bills were paid automatically, and she routinely refused to collect her mail, so the mail carrier was used to taking it back to the post office. She traveled extensively for work, so no neighbors thought anything of not seeing her around. But she'd resigned from her job, so no one at work would notice she was missing either. Hell, her neighbors even used to cut her lawn as a favor just so it'd stay tidy. Everything in her life effectively worked to create the perfect reason for no one to notice she'd died. It was only when her money ran out and the bank foreclosed on her house that someone finally found out. No one ever determined how she died, either. My theory? She didn't give a shit so hard that it killed her.