In December, the corpses of two women were found in a car left near an abandoned house. A week later, the charred remains of two other women were discovered in the trunk of another car. Police say all of them were murdered elsewhere, then brought to Detroit for disposal.
A stuffed animal on the ground at the Packard Automotive Plant a former car manufacturing factory in Detroit, Michigan
With hundreds of thousands having fled Detroit in the last decade alone, the city is turning into a deserted dumping ground for murder victims. And with its budget choked, the Motor City has had to cut back on its police force to boot.
A report published Thursday by the Associated Press tells of two bodies decomposing in an empty Detroit lot littered with tires and furniture. The teenage boys had been stripped to their underwear, shot, and then left to rot on one of the city’s many abandoned, formerly residential blocks.
They were only the latest in a string of murder victims whose remains lay for days before being discovered. Detroit has become a kind of agglomeration of rural patches contained inside an urban area, where what were once neighborhoods have turned into overgrown fields.
Outsiders – and police – are unlikely to visit the inner wasteland of what some Americans now call the Murder City.
The situation is a result of nearly fifty years of decay, after white residents started making their way to the suburbs in the 1950s. And after a vicious race riot in 1967, their mass relocation picked up in earnest.
Over the next two decades, the city’s black middle class followed, and blocks – sometimes neighborhoods – of empty houses and overgrown lawns are all that remain today.
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