Investigators think they have found the remains of a woman who was last seen four days ago near a sinkhole above a closed coal mine, the Pennsylvania coroner’s office said Friday.
Searchers think they have located the remains of 64-year-old Elizabeth Pollard, according to Sean Hribal, a deputy coroner in Westmoreland County.
Just after 11 a.m., police sent a coroner to Unity Township, where workers had been searching for Pollard by excavating the abandoned coal mine.
In a quick phone chat on Friday, Pollard’s son, Axel Hayes, stated that he had not received a response from authorities and intended to contact his father, Kenny Pollard, to inform him of the situation.
On Monday night, Elizabeth Pollard was last spotted looking for her cat Pepper close to a restaurant 0.8 kilometers (half a mile) from her house. When the local temperature fell below freezing on Tuesday morning, Pollard’s family reported her missing at around one in the morning.
In the village of Marguerite, above which coal was mined until roughly 70 years ago, the search was concentrated on a sinkhole with a manhole-sized surface gap that might have very recently opened up.
According to the police, Pollard’s vehicle was parked roughly 20 feet (6 meters) away from the sinkhole. Inside the vehicle, Pollard’s 5-year-old granddaughter was discovered unharmed.
Police were informed by hunters and restaurant employees who were in the vicinity in the hours prior to Pollard’s disappearance that they had failed to detect the sinkhole.
A pole camera equipped with a sensitive listening device was lowered into the pit in an attempt to locate Pollard, but it failed to detect anything. In an attempt to get to the spot where they thought she fell into the abyss, which was roughly 30 feet (9 meters) deep, crews cleared a ton of rock and dirt.
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