It was a great enough shock for the family of George Morales, 58, when his decomposed body was found in his van under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway underpass. What was even more surprising were the four tickets left by police who repeatedly cited the vehicle without noticing the body.
The family had been looking for the man and the van for weeks and cannot understand why the police did not report the vehicle at some point over the course of a month of tickets. Instead, every Monday, the van was simply given a new ticket. The window of the van was cracked and witnesses said that the odor was overwhelming. The body in the back seat was visible through the windows.
The coroner’s office determined that George Morales died of a heart attack.
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Ain’t nothing funny about this. Nothing at all.
This would be so damn funny if it weren’t so damn pathetic.
Outstanding police work! The cops could not even apply the basic open fields doctrine properly.
Any reasonable officer would have peered through the window of the vehicle to assess the potential for problems or other reasons why the vehicle was situated there. The body was in plain view and this vehicle was on a public roadway.
We citizens need to be protected *from* these type of LEOs and from others whose cases of poor law enforcement show up within this blawg with increasing frequencies. The standards required to enter and be retained as a law enforcement officer have devolved to about as low as they can go.