Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Tractor kills sleeping homeless man - Seattle P-I
No one knows exactly when Isaac Palmer crawled into his sleeping bag under Interstate 5 near South Massachusetts Street.
When his body was struck by a brush-clearing tractor late Saturday morning, police assumed that he had been dead for some time -- another harsh example of what happens when the roof over your head is a freeway overpass.
But autopsy results released Tuesday revealed that Palmer, 62, was alive when the S2 Spyder tractor's 18-foot arm with a rotary blade struck him in the head just before noon. The impact jolted his body out of the blackberry brambles that hid him from view of the tractor operator ...
... Transients often sleep under the freeway in the area where Palmer was killed. Tuesday evening, almost 20 homeless people were gathered not far from the spot that had been cleared. None of them knew about the brush-clearing efforts nearby, although they said they don't tend to spend a lot of time in the area.
... "It's not uncommon for people who are homeless to stay awake all night as a survival tactic and to sleep all day," she said. "It's dangerous to sleep at night." ...
No one knows exactly when Isaac Palmer crawled into his sleeping bag under Interstate 5 near South Massachusetts Street.
When his body was struck by a brush-clearing tractor late Saturday morning, police assumed that he had been dead for some time -- another harsh example of what happens when the roof over your head is a freeway overpass.
But autopsy results released Tuesday revealed that Palmer, 62, was alive when the S2 Spyder tractor's 18-foot arm with a rotary blade struck him in the head just before noon. The impact jolted his body out of the blackberry brambles that hid him from view of the tractor operator ...
... Transients often sleep under the freeway in the area where Palmer was killed. Tuesday evening, almost 20 homeless people were gathered not far from the spot that had been cleared. None of them knew about the brush-clearing efforts nearby, although they said they don't tend to spend a lot of time in the area.
... "It's not uncommon for people who are homeless to stay awake all night as a survival tactic and to sleep all day," she said. "It's dangerous to sleep at night." ...
Labels: homeless
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