Probably not Mike Wallace
Apr. 8th, 2012 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myI believe I just saw a corpse delivered to the local CBS station.
I was biking home along the Charles when I saw a helicopter pass overhead. It was dark enough that all I could make out were a few lights and the machine-gun sound of its rotors, but it looked huge — like one of those giant military helicopters, or a flying aircraft carrier from a superhero comic. Then I realized it wasn't big, just close.
I remembered there was a helipad very close by, at WBZ-TV. I tracked the helicopter through the treetops and arrived just in time to see it touch down across Soldiers Field Road from me. An ambulance was waiting in the parking lot, about a hundred feet away, with no lights or sirens. The EMTs waited for the rotors to stop turning, then slowly wheeled a gurney to the helicopter. Five minutes passed. I couldn't see much, due to distance and darkness, but I saw something placed on the gurney, and sheets being arranged. When they returned to the ambulance, the gurney was surrounded by a cordon of three or four people from the helicopter. I continued on my way.
The lack of urgency and sirens makes me think this was a dead body, but I don't know enough about coroners' procedures to understand why the handoff was made in the parking lot of a TV station. Perhaps it was a CBS helicopter, and someone died while it was in flight. Or perhaps the helicopter was transporting someone in critical condition to the hospital, and when they died en route it was diverted to a less busy helipad. Or perhaps the nearest hospital (Mount Auburn, presumably) doesn't have their own helipad.
Does anyone have a better notion?
I was biking home along the Charles when I saw a helicopter pass overhead. It was dark enough that all I could make out were a few lights and the machine-gun sound of its rotors, but it looked huge — like one of those giant military helicopters, or a flying aircraft carrier from a superhero comic. Then I realized it wasn't big, just close.
I remembered there was a helipad very close by, at WBZ-TV. I tracked the helicopter through the treetops and arrived just in time to see it touch down across Soldiers Field Road from me. An ambulance was waiting in the parking lot, about a hundred feet away, with no lights or sirens. The EMTs waited for the rotors to stop turning, then slowly wheeled a gurney to the helicopter. Five minutes passed. I couldn't see much, due to distance and darkness, but I saw something placed on the gurney, and sheets being arranged. When they returned to the ambulance, the gurney was surrounded by a cordon of three or four people from the helicopter. I continued on my way.
The lack of urgency and sirens makes me think this was a dead body, but I don't know enough about coroners' procedures to understand why the handoff was made in the parking lot of a TV station. Perhaps it was a CBS helicopter, and someone died while it was in flight. Or perhaps the helicopter was transporting someone in critical condition to the hospital, and when they died en route it was diverted to a less busy helipad. Or perhaps the nearest hospital (Mount Auburn, presumably) doesn't have their own helipad.
Does anyone have a better notion?
