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A college student died in his dorm room. It took almost two months for anyone to notice.
www.sfgate.com ^ | Published 7:54 am PDT, Wednesday, September 25, 2019 | Teo Armus

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 ...


TOPICS: Education; Health/Medicine; Society; Weird Stuff
KEYWORDS: education; newzealand; nz
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Comment #81 Removed by Moderator

To: dfwgator

If I knew my parents were tracking my phone at college I would have left it in the Library until closing time every night.


82 posted on 09/26/2019 9:24:12 AM PDT by Rebelbase
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To: MrEdd

I guess your explanation sort of makes sense. By itself, the sentence is another freebie German mockery. “She was cute but obsessive as expected”. I don’t mind the detail stereotype but some people make it out that germanic people are just all NAZIs because of it.


83 posted on 09/26/2019 9:28:19 AM PDT by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs)
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To: Tax-chick

That can happen. In my dorm, somebody left school pretty abruptly and abandoned their small Nissan truck in the parking lot. It had a pretty impressive collection of parking tickets under both windshield wipers. Then one day coming back from my last class of the day, that truck (which was sitting on 4 flat tires) was being winched up onto a flat-bed truck and being hauled off. The guy wasn’t dead or missing, he just left school. What was weird is that he left most of his possessions in his dorm room and abandoned his truck in the parking lot. I was good friends with the floor RA. He told me that he and several staff members boxed up his stuff (with the campus cops there) and shipped it to his parents’ known address and the now-impounded truck would be handled through the cops and the court system. He was still responsible for months’ worth of parking tickets, impound fees, and storage fees of the truck. It was already into the hundreds of dollars range and only going up. No idea what eventually happened. Weird things like that do happen.


84 posted on 09/26/2019 9:30:13 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: Red Badger

But then again, 1 restroom in a certain kind of establishment doesn’t tell much.

I “stand” by the standing thing. Thank God my father was man enough to do what he wanted and NOT make those gross messes in our house.


85 posted on 09/26/2019 9:30:26 AM PDT by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs)
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To: Red Badger

Man, I hope it wasn’t meningitis.


86 posted on 09/26/2019 9:32:17 AM PDT by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs)
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Comment #87 Removed by Moderator

To: malach

Get back to me with the details.


88 posted on 09/26/2019 9:38:07 AM PDT by bgill
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To: MrEdd

As a woman who USES these places, I’ve seen messy, but NEVER in my 50 years seen #2 or blood outside a toilet that wasn’t running over.


89 posted on 09/26/2019 9:39:59 AM PDT by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs)
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To: Red Badger

Yeah, I’ll bet it was bad, even for cops and the coroner that do this for a living.


90 posted on 09/26/2019 9:40:26 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: PGR88

Me too, I went to college in the mid 90s and graduated in 99. That was when I owned my first computer, a Pentium 90 MHz with the big mama 1 Gig hard drive!

It kills me how the Navy guys now have e-mail and Skype and all that. When I was in the Nav, it was letters on the ship, that was it. When my carrier pulled into a port, the phone call home from a call-center was like $40-$50.


91 posted on 09/26/2019 9:47:14 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: Starboard

I had a geography teacher that took roll daily and it counted toward the “participation” part of your grade. But that was unusual, most profs were like, “The class is here, you’re responsible to turn in homework and take the tests. As for the class lectures, you can take it or leave it.”


92 posted on 09/26/2019 9:50:42 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: sasquatch

An electric blanket will speed that up.


93 posted on 09/26/2019 9:51:49 AM PDT by Does so (To continue in English, press 2...)
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To: Starboard

I’m so glad I was in engineering. 99% of them were conservative. Any other major would’ve driven me nuts, except for maybe the sciences like physics or chemistry, they seemed good, too. Most of my general ed profs were total toolboxes. Believe it or not, one of my best classes was Ethics in Biotechnology. It was taught jointly by a philosophy prof and a doctor in the Microbiology Dept. I figured the philosophy prof would be a total leftist fruit-basket but he was really good. I don’t know how he stayed in the Philosophy Dept. without going nuts. Both profs were really good, I won the lottery on that one.


94 posted on 09/26/2019 9:58:01 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: Boogieman

No joke, it’s up to you to make it into something or nothing. If you’re paying your bills, they don’t care if you’re out playing frisbee everyday.


95 posted on 09/26/2019 9:59:35 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: Excuse_My_Bellicosity

Kind of a spooky story!


96 posted on 09/26/2019 10:02:07 AM PDT by Tax-chick ("The potential for miscalculation and chaos is substantial." ~ Kevin Williamson)
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To: Red Badger

We once responded to a lady who had been dead for a month or two. She was morbidly obese and had bent down to pickup something on the corner of her carpet. She lost her balance and fell forward. So her legs were bent with her butt up in the air and her face was on the floor and wedged into the corner with much of her 400 pounds of body weight keeping it there, her arms unable to push her out. She suffocated and died.

We broke in when the smell of her rotting corpse began disturbing the neighbors in adjacent apartments. We left her in the position that we found her until the medical examiner arrived. When we pulled her over, her face had taken the shape of the corner. It was one of the weirdest things that I had ever seen. But of course when we moved her body the smell which was already pretty bad got so much worse that a couple people had to run out of the room. It wasn’t the worst thing that I have ever smelled but it was definitely in the top three or so.


97 posted on 09/26/2019 10:04:48 AM PDT by fireman15
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To: MrEdd

One time I was in the women’s dorm and I used the bathroom on the ground floor, it was a unisex single toilet with a door that locked. The funniest graffiti I ever saw was written in pen, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, hate me because I did your dad.” Written underneath in Sharpie was, “Go home, Mom, you’re drunk.”


98 posted on 09/26/2019 10:05:52 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: MrEdd

The cops should’ve done a welfare-check. It’ll come back to them that they failed to do that. I’m sure their laziness will be written off as another “training problem” and nothing will come of it.


99 posted on 09/26/2019 10:10:01 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Liberalism is a social disease.)
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To: the OlLine Rebel

They haven’t said, but MY guess is drugs.............


100 posted on 09/26/2019 10:15:11 AM PDT by Red Badger (Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain...................)
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