A New Taipei City man was found dead after firefighters on Friday broke down the door to his bedroom, while his mother, who lived with her son, but said she had not seen him for nearly two months, did not suspect that anything was amiss.
Firefighters arrived at the apartment of the 63-year-old man, surnamed Wu (吳), after getting a tip from his elder brother that there might be a problem, a Sinjhuang Police Precinct spokesperson said.
Wu’s brother, who lives in an upper floor apartment of the same building in Sinjhuang District (新莊), said he called police after noticing through a crack in his brother’s bedroom door that Wu was lying suspiciously still, the spokesperson said.
The brother told police that he had gone to check on his brother after not seeing him for a while.
Although Wu lived in an apartment with his 83-year-old mother, the woman was unaware that her son lay dead in his room, saying only that Wu typically locked his bedroom door and refused to see anyone, the police spokesperson said.
The spokesperson quoted Wu’s mother as saying that she last saw Wu in the middle of June and thought the apartment’s bad smell was from a dead cat or a rat.
Police could not pinpoint Wu’s time of death, but estimated from the state of the corpse that he had been dead for some time, the spokesperson said, adding that they were still determining the cause of death.
Police suspect that Wu’s mother was not aware of her son’s death because their apartment was a mess and there was a general lack of interaction between the two of them, the spokesperson said.
Wu had been jobless for a long time and was living off government subsidies received by his mother, sources said.
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