Drowned body in pool for three days before being found

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There is still much confusion surrounding the drowning of 36-year-old mother of five Marie Joseph when she went swimming at a pool in Fall River, Mass. Her body wasn’t found until three days later when a group of teens jumped the pool’s fence for a night swim and discovered her body floating in the water. 

What’s baffling investigators is why the drowning went unoticed for so long. Joseph had gone to the pool with a 9-year-old child of a friend, and the boy told a lifeguard that she had gone under. Her belongings had been left by the pool, and city health inspectors had visited the pool at the time.

There was never a missing persons request, and the friends she had gone to the pool with simply thought she walked away. Fall River Mayor William Flanagan described the situation to the AP as, “a breakdown systematically somewhere.”

Read AP report on this story on the Here and Now website.

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