Story Archive

Law-Abiding

If he stopped, Ray Tomlinson thought, officials “would have impounded my vehicle. They would have probably incarcerated me to do an investigation. And I had a 93-year-old woman in my car that I needed to get home.” The part that made him nervous: a second woman in his car, aged 31, was dead. Tomlinson picked up his phone, looked at the Internet, and — as police relayed the story — concluded that by law, he had 48 hours to get the body to a morgue. He decided to take care of the matter after driving the two women in his van — the old one, his mother, and the dead one, his girlfriend — from Texas or Oklahoma, where he’d realized his girlfriend was dead, all the way home to Michigan. Tomlinson, 62, said he “cared too much for her” to abandon the woman in a hospital far from home. When he met her a year earlier, she was homeless. Police said he hasn’t been charged, at least yet, but he shouldn’t have delayed seeking help: sometimes laymen think people are dead when they aren’t — yet. (AC/Detroit Free Press) ...If he’d had a cooler head, maybe her heart would still be as warm as his.