Mon Jan 26, 4:33 PM
BAY CITY, Mich. - A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said.
Marvin Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.
Neighbours discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below zero Celsius at the time, the Bay City Times reported Monday.
"Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly," Virani said. "It's not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they're burning."
Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.
A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, Belleman said. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.
The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur's body, Belleman said. He didn't know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.
Schur's body was discovered by neighbour George Pauwels.
"His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the newspaper.
Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn't paid utility bills or arranged to do so.
He said Bay City Electric Light & Power's policies will be reviewed, but he didn't believe the city did anything wrong.
"I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbours need to keep an eye on neighbours," Belleman said. "When they think there's something wrong, they should contact the appropriate agency or city department."
Schur had no children and his wife had died several years ago.
Bay City is on Saginaw Bay, just north of the city of Saginaw in central Michigan.
4 comments:
Obama spent 125 million dollars throwing himself a party so the world could watch him dance with his wife (I did not), and 93-year old men freeze to death in modern American?! I understand we are each responsible for paying our own way, but you would think in such an advanced country citizens of a certain age would be taken care of. We sure don't value the older generation as other countries do. For anyone who doubts Obama's big plan for change he could have started with his first weekend and impressed us all. Honestly, I could care less about "the historic value of the moment" and I care more about real change. For everyone who got that warm fuzzy feeling watching the big party, how long did the warmness last? Marvin Schur could have used some of that warm fuzzy feeling. (Sorry, for rambling...but you brought it up! :)
Quite sad story. There is something which does not work right in our societies.
Seems like we need to re-evaluate some of our standard practices. People shouldn't be allowed (or rather forced) to freeze to death.
Our society is increasingly a place where we can ignore each other in pursuit of our own dreams, concerns, hobbies, complaints, TV shows. prejudices and discontent. We are not a village; we are a hundred million silos oursourcing our responsibility and compassion. NIMBY has been replaed with NMP (never my problem.) How to get to a place where we take action, rather than relying upon some governmental agency or corporation to do the caring we once did? Anser: We step out of our door, and do.
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