Posted on 09/26/2019 7:51:25 AM PDT by Red Badger
he rank odor from the end of the hallway had become too strong to ignore.
For nearly two months, it was faint enough that nobody at the University of Canterbury realized that a young man was dead, and decomposing, in his own room. Students left campus for two weeks of vacation, and returned, and still no one noticed anything.
But on Monday, police finally made it to the Sonoda dorm at the suburban campus outside Christchurch, New Zealand, where authorities discovered the body of a first-year student, local media reported. The student's father, who could not reach the young man through his friends, had also contacted police.
The young man's body had gone untouched for so long that police had to call in a special team to examine fingerprints, DNA and dental records so they could confirm his identity, Detective Senior Sgt. Craig Johnson told reporters. Most details surrounding the incident, including the student's name and age, had not been made public as of early Wednesday, and the coroner is still investigating the cause of death.
Amid an outcry from university students that's gone all the way up to New Zealand's education minister this week, a university is grappling with a grim question: How could a dead student go undiscovered for so long?
For now, no one really seems to know.
"It is inconceivable to imagine how these circumstances could have occurred," Cheryl de la Rey, the university's vice chancellor, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
De la Rey said Wednesday that the university will commission an independent investigation to examine the oversight, despite what she called an "extensive" well-being program to support students.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I can only imagine what the room must have smelled like when they finally opened the door...................
No, the “but” explains that university gets zero credit for having at least one person who is responsible enough to keep roll, because the one person who did keep roll did so due to cultural norms outside the school.
Leave manufactured slights to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Poor kid RIP....I guess his tuition was current otherwise the school would have been right on top of the situation...
That is odd. My parents were more hands-off when I went to college but I was 25 when I started, had already been through a Navy enlistment (GI Bill was paying for most of my college and I was working half-time), and I was still talking to them about weekly. It wouldn’t take two months of no-contact before my dad would’ve got in his truck, drove the 120 miles to the U, and banged on my door. My dad would’ve also noticed that something smelled dead when he got there and called 911. What the hell is wrong with people?
But the school should care because if it is like United States schools then they have assumed liability.
How sad. He was a first-year student, probably only about 18 years old. (?)
I have done a lot of janitorial work over the decades.
Men can miss the toilet when urinating, but it is women who tend to draw or write graffiti on the walls with feces or menstrual blood.
Same with me - and for me that was also an era when long-distance calls were not cheap. I would actually write letters, and call collect from the public phone once a week or so.
He did talk to the police.
The article didn’t say that he had only done so just before the police went to the university.
As a matter of fact, the article indicates that the police didn’t check the room until after the body was found due to the stench.
Then came home one day to find police, fire department, EMTs, etc, all over the place. That's when we found out he had passed. Turns out he had a bad ticker.
Same here, around the corner. Apparently, it was a good number of months.
After the cleanup, the insurance company determined the house structure was a complete loss due to the stench permeating the walls and floors. House was knocked down, and rebuilt new.
Kind of ironic, but I think woman are so clean-oriented, that their restroom activity centers around doing everything so as to not personally touch anything. By jumping thru hoops to accomplish that, the room is littered and germed for the worse.
Most likely, 18-19...................
When I graduate college, I still had a few professors she would take real call daily particularly in the smaller classes. I even had one professor who took a class in a auditorium style setting and spent about 10 minutes of every class taking rollcall, Made no sense to me to waste that much time.
I rarely called or texted my kid at college. Sometimes months would pass without us talking or texting.
But I knew he was all right because he was in constant contact with his siblings, friends, and roommates. So I never had to worry.
Maybe this father also let his son have some space. But the son was in a single room. I’ve sometimes wondered about this risk in a single room. Surrounded by other students, but entirely alone, a student could get lost in the crowd. And then no one would notice that student missing.
THAT was the purpose....................
Here’s a story from my college dorm days: a college friend of mine and his housemates all took a trip for a week somewhere. Sometime during that week, his guinea pig died and the entire 900 sq. foot house stank like you couldn’t believe. I know because I was helping them move in a couch that my friend’s father had given them.
They had to air out the whole house for a day, luckily there was a good wind and it was fall. My friend aired out his back bedroom for days and slept somewhere else for awhile. That was from a single animal that weighed about a half-pound. Now try to imagine a full size dead person. A restaurant dumpster full of wet sloppy garbage in the sun for a couple of days is an air freshener in comparison. Just being on the same floor of the building should’ve had people gagging and eyes watering.
This is just weird. Maybe there was a scenario like the guy had his dorm window full open and a good floor fan blowing through the room and out of the window so that air was always being sucked in from the hallway, so the funk of his dead body was always going out the window, who knows?
That’s what I would’ve thought, too. I’ve had teachers announce in class that a student hasn’t attended a single class in a couple of weeks, does anybody know if he/she is OK?
I know a dude tat owns a lot of rental property around a North Texas town with two large colleges. He claims that he avoids leasing to women, because they do more damage to his rental homes than the guys do.
New Zealand sure seems like a crummy place.
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