Our Backyard

It can sometimes be interesting living with a university (in a large building) right behind our house. The building itself is in the distance, but the unpaved parking lot extends to the edge of our property (and it's not usually full enough for the cars to reach near our place).

Today they had some kind of Fourth of July BBQ for the students. There was a two-story building sized blow-up of a Florida Marlins baseball player and the Florida Marlins van. There were games, music and food. It’s 2 p.m. and the party has already been packed-up. The kids liked seeing the gigantic baseball player from the back window, but he’s been deflated now.

About a month ago, we had a horrendous rain storm with nerve-wracking lightening strikes all around. The storm passed and a couple of hours later, Liam came to me and said that something terrible was happening in the parking lot and that maybe I should go to the window and see. I looked out and saw two people who seemed like detectives with clipboards walking around a woman's dead body.

I unglued my children from the window (Isabella was especially curious). I'd seen scenes like this before in my life, but the children didn’t need to be exposed to this. I told them to go and play in another room. I made sure the blinds were drawn so they wouldn't be able to keep watching. Isabella came to me with lots of questions. I just answered her honestly that someone had died and I didn't know how.

The two people near the woman had measuring tape and were measuring around the scene, taking detailed photographs of an SUV near the woman. The SUV's driver's door was wide-up. She was lying on the ground several feet away. There were rain puddles all around. I wondered if she'd been struck by lightening in that storm. I wondered if she'd be hit by the SUV. I saw no other police people around, and didn't see anyone else coming to the scene.

Oddly, some of the university students were arriving in their cars, parking in another area, but not even taking a second look at the scene they were slowly driving by. Also, a man from our neighborhood walked out there to find out what was going on. On returning to the neighborhood, I noticed he was laughing and wondered why in the world someone would be laughing walking away from a scene like that.

About an hour went by and nothing seemed to change outside. The two detectives were walking around the scene continuing their investigation. But there were no other officials arriving to the scene.

I saw one of my neighbors from two houses down sitting out in front of her house. I wandered over across the lawns to ask her if she knew what was going on in back. She didn't. I told her there was a "dead body" out there. She just looked-up and said, "Oh, that's not a body, it's a dummy. They do that all the time out there. They're just students." I remembered seeing a brochure advertising the university and the mention of forensics investigation training. Oh my goodness....I was relieved and embarrassed that I'd been "had" for so long! I have had dramatic EMT training with dummies before, but it didn't even occur to me that this was the case. I quickly told the kids about what was going on. And I made sure that they saw them when they carried the poor red haired lady life-sized doll back to their building tossed with head bobbing over their shoulder! We all had a good laugh.