Disturbing story

[LucharesuFan619 0]

I found this on another message board. It was posted early today. No source given, but this is the article:

 

 

 

 

600-Pound Woman Dies After Being Surgically Removed From Couch

 

STUART, Fla. -- A dramatic rescue ended tragically in Stuart, Florida, a rescue so difficult firefighters say they have never seen anything like it.

 

It happened late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning at the home of a 600-pound woman who was having trouble breathing. Rescuers went in not knowing how difficult it would be to get her out. 40-year-old Gail Grinds was literally stuck to her couch and had to be removed surgically at the hospital.

 

Authorities estimate she had been on the couch anywhere from two to five years.

 

 

Martin County Fire amd Rescue crews faced what seemed to be an impossible mission. Everyone going inside had to wear protective gear. The stench was so powerful they had to blast in fresh air.

 

They tried to cut out the front door, but at four-and-a-half feet wide, it wouldn't work. They had to cut plywood since a normal stretcher wouldn't do.

 

An ambulance was too small, so they brought in a trailer to get her out. While rescue crews came up with a back-door rescue plan, detectives secured what had become a crime scene, questioning family members about how it got so bad.

 

Using planks, they loaded the woman on to the trailer, still attached to the couch. Removing her would be too painful, since her body is grafted to the fabric. After years of staying put, her skin has literally become one with the sofa and it must be surgically removed.

 

Detectives are investigating whether they have a case of neglect, or if it is simply a very sad story.

 

Grinds was taken to the Martin Memorial hospital where doctors removed her from the couch, but she died in spite of all the attempts to save her life.

[Guest The Last Free Voice]

How utterly fucking pathetic. I don't feel sorry for the dead woman at all. If you're so fucking lazy you skin becomes one with the couch, you deserve to die like that.

[HollywoodSpikeJenkins 0]

This has been posted before.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Mr. Rant's going to be angry when he reads this...

[Use Your Illusion 0]

Yeah, no one talks about his girlfriend like that.

[Mole 0]

Her skin became one with the couch?

 

Too far fetched to be true.

[Guest Horse hockey!]

Sadly, it is true.

 

From WFTV.com

[The Czech Republic 0]

As the sensei of Fatassu taught me in his dojo, "to attain true slacking, you must not just sit upon the couch. You must become one with the couch."

[Ravenbomb 0]

How utterly fucking pathetic. I don't feel sorry for the dead woman at all. If you're so fucking lazy you skin becomes one with the couch, you deserve to die like that.

ditto

[Angle-plex 0]

How did this person take shits? I imagine that would be the worst part of the death, as one thing no one should ever have to do is clean up a few years worth of a 600 pound woman's crap. Not even on fucking fear factor.

[The Mandarin 0]

What a waste of human life.

 

More than that, what a waste of a perfectly fine couch.

[Guest Olympic Slam]

Becoming one with the couch..............that's like attaining fatso nirvana

[DerangedHermit 0]

Thankfully she didn't meld with a car or a gun.

[1234-5678 0]

How utterly fucking pathetic. I don't feel sorry for the dead woman at all. If you're so fucking lazy you skin becomes one with the couch, you deserve to die like that.

ditto

Double ditto. I for one, am going to celebrate the fat whale's death but eating a donut. And I fuckin hate donuts.

[DerangedHermit 0]

How utterly fucking pathetic. I don't feel sorry for the dead woman at all. If you're so fucking lazy you skin becomes one with the couch, you deserve to die like that.

ditto

Double ditto. I for one, am going to celebrate the fat whale's death but eating a donut. And I fuckin hate donuts.

Well, I celebrated by eating a huge brownie with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. It was fattening and it sucked. Damn whipped cream.

 

But what do you expect? It was one of the ONE CENT COUPONS at Pathmark.

[Mole 0]

[The Czech Republic 0]

Hey, Mole, I'm on a dialup so this is sloooooooow, the picture you post better end up being Lindsay Lohan and her amazing funbags to take our minds off this hideous woman.

 

EDIT: It's not. You lose major points d00d

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Well get cable or DSL, hippie.

 

I liked the photo -- makes me feel better about myself...

[nl5xsk1 0]

I really don't understand how someone allows their husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/parent/whatever get to that level of obese. It's obvious that Twiggy here wasn't running to the kitchen to fix herself up those meals every day. If you really loved someone, wouldn't you, you know, NOT allow them to eat themselves to death? Give her fruit for breakfast & salads for lunch & dinner (with minimal snacks) and soon enough she'll be thin enough to get her fat ass up off the couch and eat what she wants.

 

If/when she gets too fat again, start the trend over and repeat as necessary.

[Guest evenflowDDT]

"NEW YORK -- Brooklyn-based artist Cosimo Cavallaro regards his finished work of art, a bed with more than 300 pounds of sliced ham, at a gallery in New York. Cavallaro, 41, the son of immigrants from southern Italy, said the ham is "a pure form of America: all kinds of parts, boiled and pressed together." Despite his Italian heritage and training in an Italian art school, Cavallaro said he had rejected Prosciutto because "It would have been pompous." (06/03/04 AP photo)"

[Guest The Last Free Voice]

..... what.... the.....fuck? That's just weird.....

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

All those poor pigs that had to die for that. Where's PETA when you need them?

 

I really don't understand how someone allows their husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/parent/whatever get to that level of obese.

 

I've always wondered what somebody's thinking once they gain every hundred pounds or so -- "Bah, I'm at 500 -- how bad can 600 be?..."

[Guest evenflowDDT]

..... what.... the.....fuck? That's just weird.....

You see, the thing about coffins is the average one can only fit someone of about 300 lbs or so. Unless, like the great World's Fattest Man (sorry, haven't looked at a Guinness Book or Ripley's Believe it or Not! in years), someone wanted the indignity of being buried in a piano case, it's gotta go somewhere...

[Guest Arnold_OldSchool]

"NEW YORK -- Brooklyn-based artist Cosimo Cavallaro regards his finished work of art, a bed with more than 300 pounds of sliced ham, at a gallery in New York. Cavallaro, 41, the son of immigrants from southern Italy, said the ham is "a pure form of America: all kinds of parts, boiled and pressed together." Despite his Italian heritage and training in an Italian art school, Cavallaro said he had rejected Prosciutto because "It would have been pompous." (06/03/04 AP photo)"

When did Bruiser Brody take up modeling salted meats?

[Guest syncer55]

Its is kinda sad that no one was looking after her more.

[Guest Retro Rob]

At 478 pounds, Gayle Grinds had become the invisible woman.

 

Her neighbors never knew Grinds was among them, even though she lived in her small, fading, green row house in the Golden Gate community south of Stuart for 10 years.

 

Social services agencies hadn't heard of her; Grinds got by on Social Security checks while suffering from life-threatening obesity. Visitors rarely came. Grinds lived in a squalid home with a man unable to care for her, stuck too far from the stove to cook, too far from the bathroom to take a shower.

 

 

Rescuers had to fabricate a makeshift stretcher big enough to accommodate 478-pound Gayle Grinds when they came to her home Aug. 10.

 

Strangely, there is no trace of Grinds in the 1981 Martin County High School yearbook, even though she attended that school for four years. Her name isn't there. Her picture is missing.

 

It is as if she never existed.

 

"My mom didn't like anyone taking pictures of her," said Grinds' 14-year-old adopted daughter, Deanna. "She was a proud woman."

 

Grinds would have turned 40 on Aug. 27. She died early Aug. 11 at Martin Memorial Hospital South. Her case was so disturbing that some members of the ER crew that night sought counseling, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

 

Grinds had been lying on a dirty burgundy-and-gray fabric couch in her living room for most of the past six years when family members called 911 late on Aug. 10 to report that Grinds was having difficulty breathing. Unwashed for months, lying in her own excrement, couch fabric intertwined with the skin of her back, Grinds screamed in pain when the rescuers, clad in protective gear, tried to lift her.

 

They had to fabricate a makeshift stretcher big enough to accommodate Grinds, a 4-foot-10 woman who weighed 140 pounds more than the 7-foot-1 Shaquille O'Neal, but they couldn't fit her into an ambulance. With Grinds still fused to the couch, they laid her on a borrowed trailer pulled by a pickup. Surgeons never had time to separate her from the couch. She died less than two hours after being hospitalized.

 

While her death certificate lists "morbid obesity" as the cause of her passing, police said they are investigating the circumstances surrounding Grinds' care. Criminal neglect charges, they said, are possible.

 

Humiliation began with a fall

 

Earlier in her life, things were different for Grinds.

 

In her 20s, she was visible in the community where she lived at the time, a blighted, high-crime complex of $100-a-month rental units in East Stuart. Gregarious, already 300 pounds but mobile, Grinds was known as a great cook who loved to pass around her fried chicken and fish. She had a giant appetite, but she told friends a thyroid problem made her obese.

 

Former neighbors said she already lived with Herman Thomas, a roofer who was with her until the end. At the time, Thomas was bringing home enough of a paycheck to buy a small Japanese car that Grinds used to drive residents to the supermarket or church.

 

"Gayle Grinds?" repeated Alice Robertson, a longtime resident of the Tarpon Commons complex. "Everybody knew her. She was a nice lady. You couldn't help liking her. She was well-adjusted. You could hear her laugh all over the complex. She stood out because she was so big."

 

Although she didn't have any children of her own, Grinds asked a local judge to award her custody of a 9-year-old boy and 3-year-old girl orphaned when Grinds' younger sister, Jessie, died at 25. She also was known to watch other residents' children.

 

"She was a good mother to us," said Deanna, the girl whose custody Grinds was awarded in 1992. "She was buying us stuff all the time. She taught me to cook."

 

About the same time, however, Grinds' life changed in the few seconds it takes to lose one's footing.

 

Years of humiliation started with a fall.

 

"She was just walking in the complex, and she fell in mud," Robertson said. "I remember waiting for the ambulance with her. She was in pain. She was lying in mud, and no one could lift her up until the ambulance came. She broke her leg pretty bad."

 

According to Robertson and another neighbor at the complex, John Harris, it took Grinds almost a year to recover. While she was laid up with pins in her left leg, she gained another 100 pounds. For a time, she got around in a wheelchair, then with the help of a walker. Eventually, she became mobile again, and in 1994 moved a few miles south to Golden Gate, into her last home.

 

Couch an island of no return

 

In 1998, said Vivian Kendricks, Grinds' older sister, she fell again and broke the same leg. She sought treatment and recovered, Kendricks said, but never left her couch again.

 

"There is one thing that kept my sister on that couch — fear," Kendricks said. "She had been in such pain when she broke her leg that she was too afraid it would happen again."

 

Thomas, Grinds' longtime boyfriend, could not be located after Grinds' death. But several of Grinds' acquaintances said he couldn't take care of her — except to get her basic groceries.

 

Basically jobless, Thomas looks 20 years older than his 54 years. Criminal records show he has been arrested on drug- and alcohol-related charges, including a DUI on his bicycle in 2002. He was described by one Golden Gate neighbor as someone who did little more than sit alone in the yard for most of the day, drinking bottles of Budweiser while Grinds lay on the couch.

 

Then, just as Grinds needed help the most, relatives also were in trouble. Her younger brother, Clifford Grinds, was arrested 14 times in Martin County in the past 20 years on charges ranging from cocaine possession to assault and robbery. He was sentenced to a total of 14 years in prison. And Marcus, the son that Grinds adopted from her sister, last year was arrested for allegedly trying to shoplift a camera from a Stuart Wal-Mart.

 

One cousin in an ideal position to help said she didn't know about Grinds' problems. When Grinds adopted her niece and nephew, court documents show, she listed her cousin Evelyn Harris as the person who would take care of them if she died. That cousin is a family support worker for the state's Department of Children and Families in Stuart, which has a unit charged with taking care of adults who can't take care of themselves. By law, DCF workers must report cases of children or adults in need of services.

 

Harris, a 23-year DCF veteran, hung up on a reporter when asked about Grinds. Later, she put out a statement through the department's public relations office.

 

"I am deeply saddened by the loss of my cousin," she wrote. "I had no knowledge of the condition of my cousin or the home, as I had not been inside the home for more than five years. Had I known about the condition of my cousin and the home, I would of course have done something."

 

All of Harris' work evaluations at DCF showed performance ranging from "exceeding expectations" to "outstanding."

 

DCF later issued this statement by Christine Demetriades, a DCF public information officer: "After looking into this matter, the Department of Children and Families has no reason to believe there was any misconduct on the part of our employee Ms. Harris. Ms. Harris has always been a very capable and caring employee."

 

Deplorable living conditions

 

On her couch — mostly watching television, Kendricks said — Grinds sank into depression, according to an acquaintance who visited her three years ago. The home became so squalid that some of Grinds' friends who used her to watch their kids stopped taking them there.

 

The stench of stale urine and feces still emanated from the home two days after Grinds died, reaching the street 90 feet away, and at least two adjacent properties. Scrawny cats jumped in and out of the house through a broken floor-level window.

 

When the fire-rescue crew arrived at the house, they found a sparsely furnished home with no air conditioning and letters piled on a table with cockroaches eating their way through the envelopes. Around the space where Grinds' couch had been, they saw dozens of empty Publix soda cans strewn on the floor. Empty bags of Doritos, Ruffles chips, an ice-cream cone wrapper and rotting, maggot-infested oranges had been thrown on the floor among unwashed pants, T-shirts and underwear.

 

A television and stereo equipment were on the floor — bare concrete in some parts. In the kitchen, the fridge wasn't working and contained several plates of decomposing food. Two bedrooms had mattresses on the floor, including one partly burned, among clothes, paperwork and more food wrappers.

 

Two of Grinds' three surviving siblings couldn't explain why rescuers found her in such a shape. Brother Clifford Grinds, now out of jail and living 5 miles away, said he loved his sister.

 

"She was the sweetest person I knew," he said. "If we knew things were so bad, we would have done something." He declined to comment further.

 

And sister Vivian Kendricks said she did visit Grinds once in a while, washing her on her couch and cooking for her. She didn't remember the last time she saw Grinds and said nothing seemed to be wrong with her lifestyle.

 

"I know she started feeling real bad two weeks ago," Kendricks said. "But she had asthma. My sister was hard-headed. She just wouldn't get off that couch."

 

Kendricks said people in her neighborhood of East Stuart have been looking at her differently since the news spread.

 

"Some say we should go to jail for letting her deteriorate," the 44-year-old Kendricks said. "Why should we go to jail? Gayle was a grown woman. She could make her own decisions."

[BUTT 0]

Unwashed for months, lying in her own excrement, couch fabric intertwined with the skin of her back

Well doesn't that make for a nice mental picture?

[tekcop 0]

I read all that and I still don't get how nobody realized what was happening.

 

The little picture of Akebono pretending to be a kickboxer is funny, too.