Detroit: Indifference to Dead Man Encased in Ice

DETROIT (AP) -- In an abandoned warehouse, the image was stark and shocking: two denim-clad, lifeless legs poking up through trash-choked ice.

Investigators who took three 911 calls over two days before finally going out to retrieve the body will now try to figure out what killed the man, but this much is clear -- it's become another symbol of Detroit's decay and indifference.
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"Most of us grew up with this," said Mike Corbin, 34, pointing toward the old warehouse and brooding, dilapidated Michigan Central train depot nearby. ''It's depressing. Chicago and New York have their own problems, but those are in certain areas. But in Detroit, it's the entire city."
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"When you hear somebody say it's a dead body near a train station, you say 'and?'" said 28-year-old Bianca Glenn over her vegan Jamaican stew at the Mercury Coffee Bar near the abandoned warehouse. "I'm kind of desensitized to it."


Scott Ruben, 38, one of the homeless men living in the building, had noticed the body for weeks but didn't report it.

Detroit News:

A colony of homeless men live in the warehouse. Wednesday morning a few fires were burning inside oil drums. Scott Ruben, 38, huddled under filthy blankets not 20 paces from the elevator shaft.

His shack mate, Kenneth Williams, 47, returned at that point with an armload of wood.

"Yeah, he's been down there since last month at least... I thought it was a dummy myself," he said unconvincingly. Besides, Williams said, there were more pressing issues like keeping warm and finding something to eat. "You got a couple bucks?" he asked.
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There are at least 19,000 homeless people in Detroit, by some estimates. Put another way, more than 1 in 50 people here are homeless.

The human problem is so bad, and the beds so few, that some shelters in the city provide only a chair. The chair is yours as long as you sit in it. Once you leave, the chair is reassigned.

Thousands of down-on-their-luck adults do nothing more with their day than clutch onto a chair. This passes for normal in some quarters of the city.

"I hate that musical chair game," Ruben said. He said he'd rather live next to a corpse.