--:--
--:--
Full Transcription:
[0] Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad -free on Amazon Music.
[1] Download the Amazon Music app today.
[2] Today's podcast features three stories that all involve people who got trapped.
[3] The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.
[4] The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
[5] The first story you'll hear is called Deep Sea, and it's about the one place no saturation diver wants to end up.
[6] The second story you'll hear is called The Escape, and it's about a series of deep holes that lie behind a door.
[7] And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Shoot, and it's about a legally blind person who went looking for their phone in an extremely hazardous place.
[8] But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
[9] So, if that's of interest to you, please replace the Amazon Music Follow buttons eyedrops with acid.
[10] Okay, let's get into our first story called Deep Sea.
[11] I'm Dan Tibertsky.
[12] In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York, a mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast.
[13] What's the answer?
[14] And what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?
[15] Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondry and Pineapple Street Studios.
[16] Binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad -free on Wondery Plus.
[17] Something most people don't know is you can't just put scuba tanks on and then dive down to any depth and come right back up again.
[18] The compressed air inside of those scuba tanks would be a mixture of oxygen as well as most likely helium and nitrogen.
[19] And when you're breathing that compressed air, the oxygen would get breathed up and then not linger inside of your body.
[20] But the other inert gases, the helium and the nitrogen, they would be breathed up and then absorbed into your bloodstream, and they would stay there until you resurfaced.
[21] Now, it's completely harmless as long as you understand how it works getting those gases out of your body.
[22] In a nutshell, as you ascend, these inert gases will leave your body on their own, but it's a gradual process.
[23] If you rocket to the surface before this takes place, these inert gases will not leave your body and they'll expand inside of you and your body will become the equivalent of a shaken up soda can.
[24] And so at best, having all these bubble inside of you is very painful.
[25] At worst, it's lethal.
[26] The term for this condition is decompression sickness, but it's better known as the bends.
[27] The way divers protect themselves from getting the bends is on their ascent, they do what's called a decompression stop.
[28] This is something that is planned into the dive, where they stop at a certain depth for a certain amount of time, and that guarantees the inert gases have diffused out of their body before they reach the surface.
[29] Now, the deeper you go, the more decompression stops you'll have to do, and the longer they will take.
[30] For example, ascending from 2 ,000 feet would take over 33 hours to do safely.
[31] But luckily, none of us are trying to dive down to 2 ,000 feet.
[32] Well, unless you're trying to be an oil and gas saturation diver.
[33] Sat Divers, or sat divers, do construction and demolition at depths of up to 2 ,000 feet below the surface.
[34] But they don't spend 33 hours ascending after every single dive.
[35] Instead, after their dives, they're artificially kept at their working depth.
[36] The way this works is the sat diver climbs inside of a pressure chamber on board a ship, or on board an oil rig, and this chamber also doubles as their living quarters.
[37] There's beds and there's a bathroom, but it's laughably small and uncomfortable.
[38] It looks like a small submarine.
[39] And once they go inside, they seal the door, and then they pressurize it to match the depth that they're going to be working at at the bottom of the ocean.
[40] And then also there's another pressure chamber called the dive bell that's connected directly onto the side of the chamber, and that's also pressurized to match the working depth.
[41] When it was time for the sat diver to go to work, they would put their dive gear on inside at the chamber, they would crawl directly into the dive bell, they would shut the door behind them and seal it.
[42] And then people outside of the dive bell would physically disconnect it from the chamber and then using a crane, they would place it in the water and then lower it down to their working depth.
[43] And once they get down there, because the pressure inside the bell is equal to the pressure outside the bell, they can just slide open a door on the bottom and the water does not come inside.
[44] And so the divers do slip through this hole and they do the work they need to do.
[45] And when they're done, they come back inside the dive bell, they shut it up and then using their radio they communicate with the people up on the boat or up on the rig and they raise the bell back up up they reattached them to the chamber they go inside they take their stuff off there's bunk beds and there's a bathroom inside of the chamber and that's what they hang out until their next dive this process is repeated for days and days and days keeping them saturated with these gases and then at the end of their shift which is usually about a month long they will have one long decompression they do inside of the chamber while this system is highly efficient it does not change the fact that saturation diving is extremely dangerous and terrifying.
[46] The sun doesn't reach below 700 feet, so most of the time these divers are in complete and total darkness, and it's unbelievably cold down there.
[47] And so their suits have hot water pumped into them through a tether that's connected to the dive bell.
[48] But if that were to fail, hypothermia would kick in almost immediately.
[49] They have flashlights, but the water is so full of sediment around the areas that they work that shining the light is basically like shining it into fog.
[50] You can't really see very far besides right in front of your face.
[51] Sat divers also report that sometimes the water around them will suddenly move violently and they'll look around but their crummy light and lack of visibility means they can't see what it was, but they know it's a large animal that's checking them out.
[52] Other times these fairly large fish will swim right up to them and come right under their light.
[53] It's almost like they're being affectionate with the diver.
[54] But they're not being affectionate.
[55] They're trying to hide behind the sat diver from some large predator that's out there watching them.
[56] Experienced sat divers have learned to just accept their harsh environment down there and don't easily get scared.
[57] But there is one thing that all sat divers are afraid of, and that is a lost bell.
[58] When sat divers are down at their working depth, the dive bell that's brought them down there is usually situated right next to them, just kind of floating in the water.
[59] And this dive bell is connected to the ship or the oil rig above by a cable.
[60] And if that cable were to snap, the dive bell would fall to the bottom, and it would take with it the divers, because they're always tethered to the dive bell.
[61] If the divers survived the crash to the ocean floor, they would then just be trapped and have to hope that someone comes down to get them at some point before they run out of air or they succumb to hypothermia.
[62] While a lost bell scenario is incredibly rare, it has happened before.
[63] On August 7, 1979, Richard Walker was inside of a pressure chamber on board a ship in the North Sea.
[64] He was a saturation diver who for the past 10 days had been in saturation and honestly was just over it.
[65] He wanted to go home to his wife and his 15 -month -old daughter.
[66] That evening, before his scheduled dive, he wrote in his journal, Dear God, I just want to get out.
[67] Soon after writing this entry, he and his partner, Victor Giel, put on their dive gear and hopped into the dive bell.
[68] The bell was detached from the chamber and then brought over to the side of the ship, and right before they lowered it into the water, somebody noticed the location transponder that basically beamed up where it was down below had become loose, and so the decision was made to just remove it.
[69] And so after they pulled it off, lowered the dive bell onto the water and then slowly lowered it down to their working depth, which was 485 feet.
[70] Once they got down there, they opened up the hole at the bottom of the bell, and then they began taking turns, exiting the bell to go work on this underwater structure.
[71] A few hours later, at 2 .45 in the morning, Richard was the one outside of the dive bell, and he heard something behind him, and he turned around, and he saw the dive bell had slightly tilted on its side.
[72] Right as he noticed this, the radio and his helmet kicked on and told him he needed to go back inside the dive bell immediately, and they were going to try to pull them back up.
[73] And so Richard went inside the bell, he closed the hole behind him, and then he and Victor listened to the radio as they told them that the main cable holding the dive bell had slipped out.
[74] Now, this main cable was not the only thing connecting the dive bell up to the ship.
[75] There was also another clump of wires and tubes that was called the umbilical that ran all their power and hot water and their comms down to the dive bell.
[76] But this umbilical was not meant to be load -bearing.
[77] But as it stood, with this main cable gone, the umbilical was holding the dive belt from slipping to the bottom of the ocean.
[78] And so the crew up on the ship decided their only choice was to use the umbilical to reel this dive bell back in.
[79] And so they began pulling them up by the umbilical and almost immediately it completely snapped.
[80] And the dive bell fell to the bottom of the ocean about 50 feet below.
[81] Now, normally a dive bell would have what's called a clump weight hanging off the bottom of it.
[82] And in an emergency, you could detach this clump weight and the dive belt is buoyant.
[83] enough, it would go up to the surface.
[84] But Richard and Victor's company had cut corners and not used a clump weight and instead attached weights directly to the dive bell, which meant when they hit the ocean floor, the actual dive bell was sitting on the ocean floor, where that hole they would normally escape from was pressed into the seabed, so they could not get out of their dive bell.
[85] Whereas if there had been a clump weight, the clump weight would have hit the ground and the dive bell would have hovered slightly over it.
[86] And so worst case scenario, they could have gotten out and done a wet transfer into another dive bell.
[87] So with the umbilical cut, they had no radio communication, they had no heat, they had no light, and they had very little remaining oxygen.
[88] And so all they could do was just sit in darkness and hope somebody rescues them.
[89] Less than 30 minutes later, another dive ship arrived and offered to help.
[90] Now, they were not expecting to dive that night, so it took about three hours before they actually had their rescue divers in the water.
[91] And unfortunately, because the location transponder had been removed from the dive bell before Richard and Victor went under, it made it almost impossible for these rescue divers to find it.
[92] But after an hour of looking around, they finally found it.
[93] It was 7 a .m. and they went right down to the porthole and they shined a light inside of the dive bell.
[94] And inside Richard and Victor are giving a thumbs up like, hey, we're okay, we're just ready to get rescued.
[95] The fact that Richard and Victor were okay was communicated back up to the surface and everybody on top was so excited, so relieved, and in fact, they called Richard's wife, and they told her that, hey, there's been an accident, but your husband's just fine, he'll be out very soon.
[96] But despite these rescue divers locating the dive bell, because the ship up above that they were attached to kept moving around, it was proving to be extremely difficult for them to stay over the dive bell.
[97] And so for the next two hours, these rescue divers desperately tried to thread a new wire through the top of the dive bell, but it was going so poorly, and they kept going around and shining their light into the porthole to check on Richard and Victor, and it was very clear that their situation was getting worse and worse by the second.
[98] They were not giving thumbs up and smiling.
[99] They looked panicked and desperate, and they'd been without heat now for hours, and it was obvious they were running out of oxygen.
[100] Finally, at 9 a .m., so six hours after Richard and Victor had first hit the seafloor, the rescue divers managed to get a new cable through the top of the dive belt.
[101] And before they signaled to have it brought back up again, they shined a light through the porthole to check on them one more time and they saw that Richard and Victor were just sitting there with their head in their hands.
[102] They were clearly still alive and lucid, but it was like they understood they have very little time left and if this doesn't work, they're doomed.
[103] At this point, the rescue divers called up and said it was ready.
[104] They got pulled up to the surface and then the ship began pulling up the dive bell and almost immediately the cable stopped.
[105] And everybody up on the surface knew that at this point it was almost impossible for them to survive.
[106] But nonetheless, rescue divers went down and It took a while to find the dive bell because it had moved, but when they did, they shine the light through the porthole, and Richard and Victor were still very much alive, but they were not looking to interact with the divers at the window anymore.
[107] They were just sitting there, looking down, they were despondent.
[108] It was like they were making peace with what they understood was going to happen.
[109] They were not going to get out of there.
[110] And over the course of the next several hours, as these rescue divers tried desperately to get a new cable to the top of the dive bell, they kept checking on Richard and Victor, and each time they checked, they would slouch lower and lower in their seats until both of them were laying on their side.
[111] And then finally, the rescue divers got a cable to the top.
[112] And then afterwards, they went back up to the ship.
[113] And then the ship was able, this time, to pull the dive bill up and back on board.
[114] But when they opened the door, both Richard and Victor had passed away.
[115] If you're listening to this podcast, then chances are good.
[116] You are a fan of the Strange Dark and Mysterious.
[117] And if that's the case, then I've got some good news.
[118] We just launched a brand new Strange Dark and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries.
[119] And as the name suggests, it's a show about medical mysteries, a genre that many fans have been asking us to dive into for years, and we finally decided to take the plunge and the show is awesome.
[120] In this free, weekly show, we explore bizarre, unheard of diseases, strange medical mishaps, unexplainable deaths, and everything in between.
[121] Each story is totally true and totally terrifying.
[122] Go follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're a Prime member, you can listen early and ad -free on Amazon music.
[123] I'm Dan Tiberski.
[124] In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York.
[125] I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad.
[126] I'm like, stop fucking around.
[127] She's like, I can't.
[128] A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast.
[129] It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls.
[130] With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low.
[131] Everybody thought I was holding something back.
[132] Well, you were holding something back.
[133] Intentionally.
[134] Yeah, yeah.
[135] Well, well, Yeah.
[136] No, it's hysteria.
[137] It's all in your head.
[138] It's not physical.
[139] Oh, my gosh, you're exaggerating.
[140] Is this the largest mass hysteria since the witches of Salem?
[141] Or is it something else entirely?
[142] Something's wrong here.
[143] Something's not right.
[144] Leroy was the new date line and everyone was trying to solve the murder.
[145] A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical.
[146] Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
[147] You can binge all episodes of hysterical early and add, right now by joining Wondery Plus.
[148] Our next story is called The Escape.
[149] On August 6th, 2018, a manager at a grocery store in Lancaster, California, which is a town about an hour north of Los Angeles, started getting complaints from his staff and from customers about a terrible smell coming from the front of the building.
[150] The manager, who had come in the back door that day and so hadn't smelled anything, began walking through the store towards the front in order to investigate.
[151] He only made it to the cash registers, before he had to throw his arm over his mouth and his nose because the whole front half of the store reeked.
[152] The manager's first thought was that food must have somehow fallen somewhere out of view and it was rotting and that was causing the smell.
[153] But when he went past the cash registers and went out the front doors, the smell got exponentially worse and he noticed the smell was predominantly coming from this brown liquid on the ground that seemed to be leaking out of the base of one of the pillars that lined the front of the store.
[154] And so the manager thought, well, it can't be food that's causing the smell.
[155] it's got to be a sewer pipe leak that's happened right underneath this pillar and it's seeping up through the cement and that's what's causing the smell.
[156] And so the manager went back inside the store and he called a plumber and then a couple of hours later the plumber showed up.
[157] The manager pointed at the brown liquid out on the front and explained what he thought was going on.
[158] And the plumber looked at it and then looked at the manager and said, there's no sewer pipe underneath here.
[159] So whatever that liquid is, it's coming from inside the pillar.
[160] And so the purely decorative.
[161] There's no reason anything would be leaking out from inside of them.
[162] There was nothing inside of them.
[163] And so the manager asked the plumber to pull off one of the bricks around the area where this liquid was coming from so they could see what was on the other side.
[164] And so the plumber got his crowbar and he began prying off one of the bricks.
[165] And then once it was loose enough, he pulled the brick away, revealing an opening into the pillar.
[166] And the two men got down and they looked inside and what they saw horrified them.
[167] And they immediately backed up and they called the police.
[168] Five days earlier, a 35 -year -old man named Ray Rivera was pulled over by Lancaster, California police, on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle.
[169] As soon as the officer got out of their cruiser and began approaching Ray's vehicle, Ray peeled off down the road, turned the corner, and was gone.
[170] The officer immediately got back in their cruiser and took off after Ray, but he had gotten a huge jump start and he had fled into a highly populated and busy area where it would be relatively easy to blend in and disappear.
[171] The officer called for backup, and before long, there were dozens of other cop cars in the area looking for Ray, but no one could find him.
[172] A little while later, the police heard over the radio that a car matching the description of the one Ray had been driving had just crashed into a local grocery store.
[173] And so the police head over to the grocery store, and sure enough, there's Ray's white pickup truck crashed into the side of the building, but Ray is nowhere to be found.
[174] The police began asking witnesses at the store if they had seen the man driving the white pickup truck, and a few said they had.
[175] They said after he crashed, he leapt out of the vehicle and he ran inside the grocery store and then went up a flight of stairs to the staff -only area.
[176] The police went inside the grocery store and searched the staff -only area, and they searched the rest of the grocery store, but he wasn't there.
[177] And so they assumed, at some point after going inside, he managed to slip back out again and had escaped on foot.
[178] And so the police, just as a precaution, stayed outside of this grocery store for several more hours in case if Ray was in there, they would catch him trying to leave, but after a couple of hours, he never did, and so they put out a warrant for his arrest, and they left.
[179] Well, it would turn out, Ray had run inside the grocery store, but he had never left.
[180] After running up to that staff -only area, he found a crawl space, and he hid inside of it for several hours until the police left.
[181] And then at some point that evening, he decided he wanted to find a better hiding spot, and so he made his way onto the roof.
[182] Now, it's not entirely clear how he did that.
[183] Either the crawl space he was in directly connected to the roof, or he got out of the crawl space and then found his way onto the roof another way.
[184] But regardless, he found his way onto the roof, and when he got up there, he realized the roof was totally flat until you got to the very front edge of the building, the part that looked down into the parking lot.
[185] There, on the roof, was this small structure that was built up just on the front end of the roof that gave the impression from the parking lot looking up that this building was a lot bigger than it really was.
[186] On the backside of this phony structure was a door that was accessible from the roof.
[187] Ray saw this access door and ran over to it, he tried the handle, and it was unlocked.
[188] So he opened it up and he went inside.
[189] Now, this attic -like space that sat on the front of the building really didn't have that much of a purpose to it.
[190] However, it did provide access to the insides of all of the pillars that lined the front of the store.
[191] And so it's believed that Ray, as soon as he walked inside, saw these openings and believed one of them would be the perfect hiding place.
[192] And so he lowered himself feet first into one of these hollow shoots.
[193] He got his feet and his legs, his hips and most of his torso into this tight 9 inch by 17 inch space, but his shoulders were too broad.
[194] They would not fit into the pillar.
[195] And so he raised one arm over his head and he kept his other arm pinned by his side in order to make himself as narrow as possible.
[196] And this worked.
[197] Inch by inch he began sliding deeper and deeper into this two -story tall pillar until he was completely out of sight.
[198] But as soon as his shoulders had gone down into that pillar, he would have realized he had made a grave mistake.
[199] With one arm pinned above his head and the other pinned by his side, he would not have been able to pull himself back up out of this narrow space.
[200] He was stuck.
[201] And so he probably began squirming and trying to use his feet to try to get back up into the attic space, but all of that movement only made him slip farther and farther down into this pillar until his feet touched the ground at the absolute bottom.
[202] And so not only is he already in this totally compromised position that would have made it hard to breathe.
[203] He was also in such a narrow space that the walls of this pillar literally were crushing his chest, making it nearly impossible to get a full breath of air.
[204] And when he screamed out for help, nobody would have heard him because he was entombed inside of multiple layers of cement and brick.
[205] Also, making an already horrible situation that much worse, Lancaster, California was experiencing a very significant heat wave that month.
[206] And so all day long, the sun would have been blazing down on the outside of that pillar, heating up the inside like an oven.
[207] Five days after Ray got trapped, the plumber removed that brick on the pillar, and he and the store manager bent down and looked, and they saw Ray's leg.
[208] The smelly brown liquid that had been coming out of the pillar that had alerted everyone to this in the first place was purge fluid, which is something that comes out of a decomposing body.
[209] The next and final story of today's episode is called The Shoot.
[210] On July 30th, 2013, 56 -year -old Roger Miro grabbed a bag of trash from his apartment and then walked out into the hall.
[211] He turned right and walked down the hall until he reached the trash chute, which was right on the side of the wall.
[212] He opened it up.
[213] It was like a mailbox.
[214] He opened it up.
[215] He dropped his trash bag inside.
[216] He closed the trash chute and then walked back to his apartment.
[217] When he got back inside, he instinctively reached down to his right pocket to grab his cell phone, but it wasn't there.
[218] So he grabbed his left pocket, wasn't there either.
[219] He checked his back pockets.
[220] He's fishing around.
[221] And he realizes he doesn't have his phone.
[222] So he figures, okay, I must have put it down somewhere in my apartment.
[223] Now, Roger was legally blind, so it made looking for small things in his apartment quite difficult.
[224] But nonetheless, he began looking all over his apartment for his phone.
[225] He started in the kitchen, he looked all over the place, checked all the surfaces, no cell phone.
[226] He went to the living room, to the bedroom, to the bathroom, but there was no cell phone.
[227] And so Roger thought maybe when he walked to the trash shoot, he might have dropped the phone in the hallway.
[228] And so he left his apartment, he turned right, and he walked along, retracing his footsteps all the way to the trash shoot.
[229] But all along the way, there was no phone on the ground.
[230] And so as he's standing in front of the opening to this trash chute, he thinks to himself, you know, maybe I accidentally put my phone in the trash bag that I have now just dropped down this trash shoot.
[231] And so as Roger is standing there wondering what he's supposed to do, one of his neighbors walked out into the hall and looked down and saw Roger standing there kind of inquisitively looking at this opening to the trash shoot.
[232] And they asked Roger, you know, what's going on?
[233] And Roger explained the whole phone situation.
[234] and the neighbor said, well, you know, hey, why don't you go down to the first floor and ask the manager if you can get the key to the trash room on the first floor where all the trash goes?
[235] And so Roger said, thank you very much.
[236] He turned and made his way to the elevator and the neighbor went back inside of his apartment.
[237] Roger went down to the first floor.
[238] He went to the manager's office.
[239] He knocked on the door.
[240] And when the door opened, the manager was obviously very busy with something.
[241] And Roger would say, hey, you know, I'm just looking to get into the trash room.
[242] I think I might have accidentally thrown my phone away.
[243] and I just want to have a look in the trash to see if I can find it.
[244] Now, this manager knew he was not allowed to let anybody who lived in the apartment complex go into that trash room on their own.
[245] It was a dangerous space.
[246] And so the manager was supposed to go in there with them if they needed to go in and look around in the trash.
[247] But right when Roger went up to the manager's office, the manager was waiting for a very important phone call and so couldn't really leave his office.
[248] But the manager kind of empathized with Roger and felt bad for him.
[249] and said okay you know what i'll just give you the key you can go in there on your own and go looking for your cell phone i hope you find it and when you're done just bring the key back here and so roger said thank you very much he took the key he left the office and he made his way down the hall to the trash room when he got there he unlocked the lock and went inside a few hours later roger's wife came home from work and when she got to the apartment roger wasn't in there she tried calling his cell phone but he didn't pick up and so she walked around the apartment hoping there would be some indication of where he might have gone, like a letter or something, but there was nothing.
[250] And so Roger's wife was really concerned about this because this was totally out of character for her husband to go out at night on his own.
[251] And so she, operating on a gut instinct, called the police and reported him missing.
[252] And so a few minutes later, two police officers show up at this apartment building.
[253] They go up to Roger's apartment, they speak to Roger's wife, and then they go into the hall and they knock on some doors of other neighbors in the area.
[254] And after speaking with them, one of the neighbors who had seen Roger earlier said, you know, hey, he lost his phone and the last I spoke to him, he was going to go down to the trash room to try to see if he could find his phone down there.
[255] And so the officers go down to the first floor, they go to the trash room and they try the door and it's unlocked.
[256] And when they open up the door and they look inside right in the middle of this totally nondescript windowless room that basically looked like a basement was this huge green dumpster.
[257] And above the green dumpster, high up on the ceiling, was this round opening and that was the bottom of the trash chute.
[258] So when people like Roger and the other people who lived in this apartment building dropped their trash down their respective trash chute on each floor, the trash would come tumbling down and literally fall out of the ceiling into the dumpster.
[259] Now this dumpster was unique.
[260] It was not like other dumpsters where the top was just wide open and anyone could lob a bag of trash in.
[261] Now this dumpster only the left side of the dumpster had an opening for trash.
[262] The rest of the dumpster was completely welded shut.
[263] There was no way into it.
[264] And so on the left side, where this dumpster opened up to allow trash to come in, it was positioned right underneath that opening in the ceiling where the trash came tumbling down.
[265] And it wasn't just an opening.
[266] It was like this near vertical tunnel that was welded on to the top of this dumpster.
[267] And it went straight up and it had this big open mouth at the top, almost like a funnel.
[268] And it was there to catch the trash as it fell down.
[269] And it would go down this tunnel down into the dumpster.
[270] And so, And so the gap between the ceiling and the top of this near vertical tunnel, this shoot, was maybe three or four feet.
[271] And so when these officers looked into this room and they saw this dumpster and the shoot and this hole in the ceiling, they also saw a ladder had been propped up on the left side of the dumpster right up against that near vertical tunnel, as if someone was trying to look down into the dumpster itself.
[272] And so one of the officers walked over, they climbed up the ladder, and when they looked down into this tunnel down into the dumpster, they found Roger.
[273] After a lengthy investigation, this is what is believed to have happened to him.
[274] After Roger got that key from the manager, he went to the trash room, he opened it up, and then he went inside and found this huge dumpster.
[275] And he would have quickly realized the only way to look into the dumpster, and so to go looking for his phone, was to look down into this tunnel.
[276] There was a ladder nearby, so he grabbed it and he propped it up against the side of the dumpster, and he climbed up on top, and he looked down into the tunnel, down into the dumpster, and as he was looking, either some trash from the ceiling fell down and struck him, causing him to lose his balance, or he just slipped somehow.
[277] But either way, he lost his balance, and he tumbled into the tunnel down into the dumpster.
[278] And what Roger didn't know is as soon as that happened, he was doomed.
[279] Because this was not some ordinary dumpster.
[280] This was a trash compactor, And as soon as Roger fell down that tunnel, his body triggered an electronic sensor that activated the trash compactor.
[281] So the way this worked is there was this big metal ram inside the dumpster.
[282] There's a ram on one side.
[283] And once it gets activated, it will press.
[284] There's a hydraulic press that pushes it all the way to the other side.
[285] So any of the trash in this dumpster will get compressed against the other side of the dumpster.
[286] And then at that point, the ram comes all the way back.
[287] And so every time trash would come down that shoot, it would trigger that sensor, the trash compactor would start, it would flatten the trash, and so on and so forth.
[288] So Roger has fallen down into the dumpster.
[289] He's triggered this compactor, but he's legally blind.
[290] He's probably dazed from the fall.
[291] And so by the time he realizes what's going on and he's kind of looking around, there is a hydraulic press bearing down on him.
[292] And so he probably tried to jump up the tunnel to try to escape the dumpster.
[293] But there was no ladder inside this tunnel and it was nearly vertical.
[294] so there was no way to climb up and out of it.
[295] And inside of the dumpster itself, there was no emergency shutoff switch and there was no emergency exit.
[296] And so at some point, it's assumed that Roger realized he was not going to be able to climb up the tunnel.
[297] And so he only had one direction he could go, which was to retreat to the far side of the dumpster, as far away from the press as he possibly could be.
[298] But once he got over there, there was nowhere for him to go.
[299] And so he was forced to just wait as this hydraulic press slowly moved across until it finally reached him and crushed him.
[300] Now, we don't know if that very first hydraulic press actually killed Roger.
[301] All we know is Roger was trapped inside of this dumpster for several hours, and over that period of time, more and more trash was dropped down the shoot, activating the press over and over and over again.
[302] And so by the time the police actually looked down into the dumpster, they saw a part of Roger's body, and immediately they could tell there was nothing they could do.
[303] Roger was definitely deceased.
[304] Roger's wife would sue the manager of the apartment building as well as the company that owned the apartment building for their negligence, but the outcomes of that case have not been made public.
[305] Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast.
[306] If you got something out of this episode, and you haven't done this already, please replace the Amazon Music Follow buttons eyedrops with acid.
[307] This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning, But in the meantime, you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories we have posted on our main YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin.
[308] We have a registered 501C3 charitable organization called the Mr. Ballin Foundation that honors and supports victims of violent crime as well as their families.
[309] Monthly donors to the Mr. Ballin Foundation honor them society will receive free gifts and exclusive invites to special live events.
[310] go to Mr. Ballin.
[311] Foundation and click Get Involved to join the Honor Them Society today.
[312] If you want to get in touch with me, please follow me on any major social media platform and then send me a direct message.
[313] My username is just at Mr. Ballin, and I really do read the majority of my DMs.
[314] Lastly, be sure to check out our brand new website, balin studios .com, to buy merch, to join our Discord server, to learn about upcoming events, basically anything we're doing, we're going to put it.
[315] on balin studios .com.
[316] So that's going to do it.
[317] I really appreciate your support.
[318] Until next time, see you.
[319] Hey, Prime members.
[320] You can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad -free on Amazon Music.
[321] Download the Amazon Music app today.
[322] And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.
[323] She struck him with her motor vehicle.
[324] She had been under the influence that she left him there.
[325] In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O 'Keefe.
[326] It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location.
[327] What happens next?
[328] Depends on who you ask.
[329] Was it a crime of passion?
[330] If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling.
[331] This was clearly an intentional act.
[332] And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia.
[333] Or a corrupt police cover -up.
[334] If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover -up to prevent one of their own from going down.
[335] Everyone had an opinion.
[336] And after the 10 -week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision.
[337] To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is.
[338] Law and crime presents the most in -depth analysis to date.
[339] of the sensational case in Karen.
[340] You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus.
[341] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.