Elderly Man Drives 3 Miles With Body Smashed on Hood<\/font> <\/strong><\/p>\nST. PETERSBURG – Ralph Parker had shown signs of
\n dementia before, but his condition worsened dramatically over the past
\n week. Argumentative one minute, calm the next. Alarmed, Parker’s son
\n left Idaho on Wednesday to get his 93-year-old father in a safe place,
\n police
\n said.<\/p>\n
Before he could get here, his dad backed his gold Chevrolet Malibu out
\n of the driveway and went for a drive.<\/p>\n
It ended horribly. Parker hit a man crossing 34th Street S, severing the
\n man’s right leg, then drove 3 miles with the body stuck in the windshield.<\/p>\n
When police asked Parker what happened, he said the body seemed to drop
\n from the sky.
\n Parker thought it was December and that he was headed home to Pinellas
\n Park, not south toward the Sunshine Skyway bridge, police said.<\/p>\n
Julia Zumpf was driving south on 34th Street about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday
\n when she saw the gold Malibu unsteady in the road. Drunken driver, she
\n thought.<\/p>\n
Then Zumpf, 44, saw a pedestrian step off the center median and head across
\n the three-lane road.<\/p>\n
The driver of the Malibu slammed on his brakes, Zumpf said. She thought
\n the driver missed him but suddenly she heard a crash and saw a leg flying
\n in front of her blue Buick LeSabre. "It went at least one story in
\n the air," she said.<\/p>\n
His shoe then popped off before the limb came to a rest on a strip of grass
\n west of the street, in front of Howard Johnson’s.<\/p>\n
The driver kept going, as if not realizing what happened, Zumpf said. She
\n drove several blocks, trying to locate the body, thinking it rolled off
\n the car, and called 911. "I thought it was just a hit-and-run," she
\n said.<\/p>\n
The body was still on the Malibu. The head and shoulders were punched through
\n the windshield, the torso slung backward over the hood.<\/p>\n
Three miles later, the car approached the Sunshine Skyway toll bridge.
\n As Parker decelerated, the body slumped entirely inside, the man’s face
\n pushed up against the dash.
\n The macabre scene looked like a Halloween prank to the toll taker. Then
\n she saw the blood.<\/p>\n
story from the
\n Saint Petersburg Times<\/a>\n <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elderly Man Drives 3 Miles With Body Smashed on Hood ST. PETERSBURG – Ralph Parker had shown signs of dementia before, but his condition worsened dramatically over the past week. Argumentative one minute, calm the next. Alarmed, Parker’s son left … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[576],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wacky-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}