A group of thieves in Georgia lived in the home of a deceased man while his body rotted away in a bathroom for months.
Deceased man found decaying in home taken over by squatters
Cobb County Police were called to perform a welfare check at the residence of 71-year-old Robert Westbrook at the beginning of October.
When they arrived at his home in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, officers found his body in a bathtub.
According to detectives, the decomposition of his body was so severe that it had essentially been mummified.
Investigators suspect that Westbrook’s body had been decaying for around three months.
During this period, intruders allegedly occupied his home, rummaging through his possessions and taking what they could remove, according to police reports.
“Drawers were overturned. His master bedroom was completely just disheveled,” Detective Daniel Goduto said about the state of the home.
Despite the destruction, there were signs that someone was living in the residence. “The trash looked like it was taken out regularly. It looked like there was stuff in the garbage can that was fairly new,” he commented.
Thieves returned to home of deceased man after cops came
The day after cops found the deceased man, his neighbor reported seeing individuals loitering in Westbrook’s driveway.
Responding officers found four people loading his property into their vehicle when they arrived on scene.
Additionally, Westbrook’s car was missing, but police tracked it down at a gas station, where they arrested three additional suspects.
Authorities revealed that the suspects had been using Westbrook’s credit cards and forging checks to siphon his funds. They now face numerous charges, including burglary and fraud.
Westbrook is though to have died of natural causes. Efforts to contact his family were unsuccessful, as all of his known relatives were deceased.
A neighbor, Sonya da Silva, said the ordeal was “a shame and it’s sad. “To take advantage of a dead person is just sick.”
Decaying body found in hearse
In an unrelated incident, a former Colorado funeral home operator is accused of keeping a woman’s body in a hearse on his property for more than a year.
Miles Harford, 34, is looking at charges including forgery, corpse abuse, and theft, according to authorities.
On Feb. 6, the Denver Police were called by the landlord who had rented a home to Harford.
The property owner had evicted him and was cleaning out the mess he left behind, when numerous cremated remains were discovered.
While on the property police discovered a hearse containing the body of a woman on a gurney, covered with blankets and still marked with a coroner’s tag.
The deceased woman was identified as Christina Rosales, who had passed away from Alzheimer’s disease at age 63 in August 2022.
Additionally, police discovered 35 cremated remains of individuals who died between 2012 and 2021, scattered throughout the property.
Rosales’ family informed investigators that Harford, who owned the defunct Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services, had previously provided them with what they believed were her cremains.
“The image of her in the back of a car treated like a dog just in blankets. It just … it angers me,” her husband, George Rosales, told a local outlet.
“She really liked him and he promised he would take care of her,” he said about Hartford, who she had known since he was in middle school.
Harford was initially scheduled for arraignment on Friday, but after brief discussions between prosecutors, defense lawyers, and the judge, the hearing was postponed to December 9.
