In Waco news – this is sad
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Dead woman raises alarm at local middle school
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Friday, January 26, 2007
By Mónica Ortiz Uribe and Erin Quinn
Tribune-Herald staff writers
Waco police late Thursday put out a call for help throughout the Tennyson Middle School neighborhood and beyond after a dead woman, appearing to be in her 60s and wearing a blue flannel bathrobe, was found nestled inside an outdoor heating and cooling unit alongside the school.
For starters, police want to know who the dead woman is and why she came to end up sitting bent over inside the unit. They say they now believe she bent back part of the unit’s vented panel and climbed inside.
Described as being in her 60s and having strawberry blonde hair, the woman was discovered about 1:15 p.m. inside the corner of the large condensing unit after a privately contracted repair team was summoned to learn why the unit wasn’t providing heat to the school at 6100 Tennyson Drive, a few blocks northwest of Sanger Avenue.
Waco police spokesman Steve Anderson said the woman had been inside the unit for less than 24 hours because the day before a school district repair crew worked on the same unit.
Donnie Jones, a maintenance worker who found the body with a colleague, told the Tribune-Herald he believes the woman took refuge in the heating and cooling unit to escape the weather. The temperature dropped into the 30s on Wednesday night, hitting a low of 32 around dawn Thursday.
Neither Anderson nor Jones noticed whether the dead woman was wearing any sort of footwear.
The body’s discovery and subsequent investigation by police went largely unnoticed by most Tennyson students. Only near the end of school did principal Robin Wilson inform students about the body found in the heating and cooling unit.
Students were sent home with a letter from Wilson for their parents.
“I want to assure you that at no time were students in the area prior to the discovery of the body,” Wilson wrote in the letter to parents. “Likewise, students were never allowed near the area after its discovery.”
After discovery of the body, the principal wrote parents, “our immediate concern here at Tennyson was completing the school day in a normal fashion and planning for a dismissal that would not expose children to the scene of the police investigation.”
Earlier in the afternoon, Jones and his partner, Edwin Cortez, maintenance technicians for Classic Heat & Air, headed out to the middle school in West Waco with their toolboxes, prepared to fix the heating system.
No one was around when the two approached the 6-by-9-foot condenser unit just outside the school cafeteria, near the west side of the building and obscured by a brick facade. Jones said they noticed the vent panels were bent oddly out of shape.
Jones went around to the back of the unit, while Cortez pried open the vent panels to look inside.
What he saw sent him running.
“There’s a dead body in there!” Cortez yelled.
Not
quite believing his partner, Jones said he calmly took a look inside, then jumped when he saw the body.
“She was dressed in a blue flower-printed bathrobe,” he said. “I was shocked. I didn’t look very long.”
Jones then called the district’s maintenance supervisor, and within minutes the area was bustling with police and school officials.
Classes continued as usual inside the school as the principal tried to decide how best to communicate to students and parents that a body had been found on campus.
After Wilson prepared the letter for students to take home with them, she said she made an announcement to teachers and students about the body of a “deceased woman” over the intercom only minutes before the last bell rang.
The announcement sparked a chaos of chatter in 12-year-old Alexander Lizana’s orchestra class.
“Kids started saying, ‘I’m going to die. I’d better get out of school. I’m going to die,’ ” Alexander said. “Some were really scared.”
After class let out, Alexander walked down the hallway and heard clusters of his schoolmates abuzz about the news. She was murdered, some said. She was homeless, others said. She killed somebody, still others said.
When he later handed the principal’s letter to his mother, Luz Saldaña, she reminded him not to wander off alone while at school.
For other students, the offbeat news was no big deal.
Twelve-year-old John Mack was in seventh period reading class when he heard the announcement. He also heard the commotion. He said he knew what the other kids were saying. It didn’t matter.
“Are you serious? A dead body?” said his sister, Shanese Johnson, when she picked him up from school and found out from one of his friends.
John just shrugged.
That afternoon, police said they were baffled as to the woman’s identity and how or why she was hunched up inside the condenser unit in her flannel robe.
Jones, the former maintenance director of an area nursing home, said he believes the woman could have loosened the vent panels to crawl inside the condenser unit.
“I worked at a nursing home,” he said. “They can get pretty strong when they want to.”
On the other hand, Jones said it would have been difficult for someone to have shoved the woman into the condenser unit through the vent panels.
“I think she tried to get in there out of the weather,” he said.
Justice of the Peace Billy Martin ordered an autopsy. Police ask anyone with information concerning the identity of the woman — now known only as “Jane Doe” — to call 750-7500.
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