Weird Philly Crimes #3 Bags Of Vomit

 

Main Line Suburban Life (Ardmore-Wayne, PA)

June 24, 2011 Section: News

Radnor cops investigate stomach-turning mystery Author: JEFF WOLFE

Article Text:

Just the thought of vomit makes some people well … vomit.

But when it's approximately 35 pounds of it, found in a bag in a shopping center parking lot, that can be more than nauseating.

Radnor Township police are investigating a case where two bags of vomit were found in a shopping center parking lot at 550 E. Lancaster Ave. June 5. The first bag had been found a week earlier, but wasn't reported to police.

Just how the bags of vomit got there and where they came from was still a mystery Thursday.

"There's a lot of possibilities," Radnor Township Police Sgt. Andy Block said. "It could be a situation where it's being picked up and disposed of as bio waste from a physician's office or gastrointestinal lab."

The second bag had what appeared to be a plastic medical container inside of it holding the vomit. That's leading police to think it could have come from a medical lab that didn't want to pay disposal costs, which would be about $300 for a 30-pound bag, according to one medical waste disposal company in southeastern Pennsylvania.

"If they're doing something like that, it has to be properly disposed of and it's not cheap to dispose of," Block said. "So they just left it there for someone else.

"But that's just speculation right now."

One thing that is not speculation is that kind of waste can be a health hazard.

"It's a public health and safety concern," Block said. "Who knows what's contained in it. There's a long laundry list of things."

Another theory is that since each bag was found on a Sunday, they each could have been disposed of after a weekend of partying.

And yet one more possibility is that a person, or persons, with an eating disorder, such as bulimia, could have kept a container until it was full, then left it in the parking lot.

An employee at the Bed, Bath and Beyond in the shopping center originally discovered the bag about 10 parking rows from the store's front behind a tree.

Block said one reason the bags may not have been put in a Dumpster is that it is a crime in Pennsylvania to discard materials in Dumpsters.

He said whoever left the bag, may have been worried about security cameras.

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