At the Sun Petro Truck Stop in Forest Park area of Atlanta, GA, a 31-year-old woman was “found dead on floor between cabin & trailer” just before 10 a.m. on Tuesday morning. We’re assuming that means her body was found on the catwalk, at the back of the tractor.
Watch video here.
The woman found dead is reported to be the girlfriend of Southern Refrigerated Transport truck driver Ira Collier, who told reporters “they (he and his girlfriend) arrived from Pennsylvania on Saturday and had spent the night in the truck.”
Collier says his girlfriend left the truck sometime in the night (I assume Monday night/Tuesday morning) while he was asleep, then returned “in bad shape” with a man he didn’t know. He thinks maybe she was “under the influence of something”.
“She left some time last night while I was asleep, then I woke up to a man banging on my truck saying, ‘Man, you need to come get your girl out of my car because she’s all messed up. I don’t even know who the man was,” Collier said. “I got her out and helped her into my truck.”
Collier continued, “she got in the truck, and she was snoring. I watched her for a while. And I fell asleep. I woke up this morning, she was gone.”
He said “he’ll always wonder what happened, who his girlfriend was with, and what went wrong”.
Forest Park police say woman's body was found on floor between cabin & trailer. No signs of foul play but police say it's "suspicious." pic.twitter.com/l6AmkS0l6M
— Portia Bruner (@PortiaFOX5) March 14, 2017
A police investigation is ongoing, in an effort to determine how this woman died. But “foul play not yet suspected”.
FYI: This is not a truck stop to go wandering around in the middle of the night. Google reviews of the place are along the lines of: “horrible place”, “shady looking neighborhood”, “dirty nasty truck stop”, “charges $10 to park if you don’t fuel” (which isn’t all that uncommon in small truck stops in urban areas), and other similar reviews. Well, I guess this describes most small truck stops in urban areas!
For more reviews, which are actually pretty telling, given the circumstances, read here.
“I’ve been driving a truck 23 years and this is the first time I’ve ever seen something like this happen and it’s very disturbing to me,” said trucker Larry Thrift.
“There were no signs of foul play, but we have to treat this as suspicious since women in their 30s usually just don’t die from natural causes,” said Captain Delk.
Well, ya think? “Messed up”? “Under the influence of something”?
Related Information: “Modern-day slavery, or human trafficking exists whenever people are bought and sold for forced labor or commercial sex. Around the world, there are an estimated 20.9 million slaves today. Human trafficking has been reported in all 50 states, and the number of victims in the United States is estimated in the hundreds of thousands.” Truckers Against Trafficking.