Hartford firefighters leave the scene after pronouncing the man dead. All photos © Eric Francis.
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION - A “scrap hunter” out for a stroll alongside the railroad tracks Sunday afternoon discovered the body of an unidentified man who appeared to be a transient underneath the Urban Bridge spanning the White River, a stone’s throw from the Bugbee Senior Center.
A brief flurry of emergency services activity followed the discovery shortly after 2 p.m., but once EMTs confirmed the man was deceased, Hartford police took over the scene and began conducting a death investigation.
There were no signs of foul play and police did not recognize the individual, although officers said this was not unusual, given the volume of often homeless “campers” who begin drifting through downtown White River Junction about this time each spring.
Hartford Police Corporal Daniel Bennett emerges from underneath the section of the bridge where the body lay against a concrete wall that forms the end abutment.
The man who made the disturbing discovery declined to give his name but explained, “I was just out picking up scrap and I was going to the LISTEN Center to spend some money and then I was going to pick up some honeybuns and go home. I went underneath the bridge and I seen the backpack just sitting there and then I seen him laying face down.”
He added that it did not seem like the deceased individual, who appeared to be in his mid-30s, had actually been camping there. “There was just the backpack and a couple of big 24-ounce beer cans. I went up to him and gave him a couple of taps but I could tell it was over.”
Police said there was little to indicate how long the man might have been there before he was found. The body was under the center of the bridge next to a concrete wall at the top of a steep slope as close to the senior center end as it’s possible to get underneath the massive structure. Although the area was littered in trash, suggesting people had been hanging out there at various times in the past, it did not appear to be a spot where anyone had been camping recently.
A medicolegal death investigator, a detective and Officer Bennett look over the scene where the body was found.
The scene Sunday was just a few yards away, across multiple rows of train tracks, from where an abandoned homeless encampment caught fire less than a week ago. It was also in the same general vicinity where the bodies of two of the three homeless individuals who died outdoors in unrelated incidents in White River Junction last year were found.
A representative of the medical examiner’s office was on scene mid-afternoon Sunday and the body has been taken to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Burlington for positive identification and determination of the cause and manner of death, a process that could take weeks if toxicology tests are required.
