Only in New York...man dead in van for weeks

A man's decomposing body inside a minivan covered in parking tickets went undiscovered for weeks because the vehicle's windows were apparently tinted and ticketing officers don't normally search cars, police said Friday.

The body was found in the backseat Wednesday when a city marshal tried to tow the vehicle from beneath an overpass on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, police said, according to an AP report.

Weeks. He was inside the car dead for weeks, my friends, and none of the ticketing officers noticed. Are you fucking kidding me? Tinted windows or not, when so many tickets pile up on a windshield that you, while giving yet another ticket, have to use both windshield wipers to pin them down, when there are so many it's obvious some have seen their share of rainy days, don't you at some point wonder what's up with that car and the owner? Wouldn't you take a peek inside the car? Oh, but that's not in the their job description. Jeez.

George Morales, a 59-year-old handyman, who according to the medical examiner died naturally from heart disease, was believed to have been living out of the white Chevrolet minivan, which had North Carolina plates, AP reported.

But his daughter, Jennifer Morales, 29, told the Daily News he had been living with her family in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. She said she last saw him in early May and had called police. But police do not have a missing person's report on record for Morales, AP reported.

"The window was cracked open. I don't understand how no one noticed him. They just gave him tickets," she told the Daily News.

So the geniuses didn't even have to stick their faces to the glass to see through the tinted windows--a window was cracked open. How tuned-out do you have to be to your environment to miss something like this?

It wasn't clear exactly how many tickets were on the minivan's windshield when the body was discovered. Well, in New York City, notorious for issuing parking tickets, how many do you think there were? It had to be tons...an encyclopedia of tickets.

Witnesses had reported a foul odor near the vehicle. Oh, for the love of god...so the evidently brain-dead ticket officers also didn't notice the odor. Does NY smell that bad.

So it turns out that the fear many New Yorkers have of dying and not being found for days until a bad smell gets so bad neighbors finally notice is a valid one.

Sources: The Associated Press
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