WARREN, Mich. – Police in Warren, Mich. made a horrifying discovery this week while performing a welfare check at a home.
When they entered the home, officers found a 68-year-old man dead in his bed. Police said the body was badly decomposed, and he might have been dead for as long as a year.
The dead man's girlfriend has been living alongside his body at the home on Burgundy Street, police said. Officials took the woman to a nearby hospital for a mental evaluation.
Medical examiners said it could take a while to determine how the man died due to the stage of decomposition.
"It's just a shame that someone else didn't see what was going on," neighbor Sharon Lefebve said. "A decomposed body is not pleasant at all, and she lived that way. Sad. Very sad."
The man was dead in the house for months, but neighbor Ms. Dinoto, who asked not to have her first name used, said she remembers the last time she saw him.
"We had a heavy snowfall, and I saw the gentleman out shoveling," Dinoto said. "Then I never saw him after that."
But Dinoto said she has seen the woman.
"Sometimes she would sit in her car after she got home," Dinoto said. "I had a weird feeling, but I get weird feelings always seeing her coming and going, but never seeing him."
The woman never told police the man was dead. Police are waiting on an autopsy to nail down a timeline of how and when the man died.
"Hopefully they'll get help for her and he'll be buried properly," Lefebve said.
Officials don't know how long it will take for the autopsy results to come in.