The Body In Battery Park – 7 Days Later And Something Is Starting To Smell…
Author: Bookstore Piet // Category: 'hood, 4th Precinct, house, neighbours, richmond, the body
A week has passed since the body of a man turned up in the unlicensed rooming house across the street. Beyond the initial reports of the body having been there for several days prior to ‘discovery’ this is what we have learned so far:
a) The dead 44-year-old didn’t live there.
b) The person who occupied that room and didn’t ‘notice’ the dead body for several days has not been around lately. Speculation among the neighbours is that the body expired elsewhere and was brought to the house.
c) The owners have actually paid the water bill for two months in a row and they currently have running water (it’s been cut off twice this year alone – I guess the owners payment on their brand new Mercedes is more important…).
d) The police, having spoken to people claiming to be residents instead of the actual residents, actually have the death listed as a ‘pending matter’. Considering the house cleaning prior to their arrival I doubt there was any evidence left and they don’t seem to be treating this very seriously. Let’s keep the murder rate down through creative record keeping.
New developments for the house include a return of most, but not all, of the normal residents. Drug activity, which was down over the weekend is starting to pick up again. Oh, and a new city agency has them in their sites.
Yep, we’ve city building and zoning inspectors sniffing around. Normally that makes all of us residents nervous as most of our houses are in various stages of renovation (yes, rain gutters are on my list but I’ve got other things to do first…) but they are all interested in the ‘house across the street’. I don’t know what got them started. It may have been my multiple phone calls over the years. It wasn’t the body (they didn’t know) and it certainly wasn’t Councilwoman Ellen Robertson (who only gets really involved with the community just prior to an election – she comes by our house each election cycle, I complain to her about the rooming house, she says she’ll look into it, nothing happens.).
Whatever it was the city inspector is pissed. There never seems to be anyone home (he should sit in the middle of the street and honk his horn like all their other visitors/customers) and he can’t get in. He says he knows it’s a rooming house but they don’t have the permits for it and it lost it’s ‘grandfather’ status due to a re-zoning (single-family homes only) of the neighbourhood which went into effect when the house last sold in 2004. The inspector has vowed to shut them down. Of all the people in life I do not want to have annoyed at me it’s a city building inspector.
It’s kind of sad. The police have allowed a known drug house to continue operating for years and look to be more interested in managing the ‘numbers’ of the murder rate rather than investigating a very suspicious death. No, instead the most dangerous house on the block will not be shut down by the men in blue but instead by a bureaucrat enforcing regulations. Who needs detectives and forensics when you can just be caught by the red tape.