Could be, and it seems pretty cruel. He put his family through hell for the past eight months. He could have left a note that said where he would be found.
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Good point. Hand’t thought of that. 
Agreed, though one could argue that even suicides who leave notes are being cruel to their loved ones
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The family had visited the airport early on.
Not only does it say that in TFA, it’s also quoted in the synopsis on the BB post. Even when you’re looking, it’s easy to overlook a specific car after you’ve looked at 10000 of them.
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Lee Child’s fictional protagonist Jack Reacher uses this technique for ditching bodies & cars a couple of times in the novels. Body goes in the trunk, car goes in the long term parking lot, nobody notices a thing for months.
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This is my local airport. It is a great airport if it is your starting point or ending point and are being picked up (or can afford to park in the parking right at the terminal). The economy parking is acres of paved lot (kansas city land is cheap, much cheaper to build horizontally than vertically). Buses pick people up following a set route. Most people park around the bus stops.
It would be pretty easy to park the truck where not a lot of people would park except in high traffic times. Trucks tend to be above than sight line so i doubt people would glance in and see the body (and they said it was covered with a blanket so even then they may have just assumed he was sleeping).
But honestly i’m surprised the airport doesn’t scan license plates every day. Not to catch cheaters but just to be annoying data collectors, i thought all the cops were doing it.
Replacement of the airport is on the ballot for November. A lot of people like the design since it’s about 2 minutes from gate to curb, but we can’t get a lot of airlines in the city because if they have to divide gates between the terminal it really sucks for passengers to move between the terminals quickly (have to wait on a bus out side of security, then go back through security at other gate). so hopefully we replace it.
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It was a great layout pre-9/11 when security was private and there was a security checkpoint / metal detector for most gates with only a few gates that had to share security. This often meant that there was no lines at all for security. Post-9/11 the TSA tried to force the one checkpoint model into the airport and it has not worked well at all.
For the brief time between the start of online check-in and the consolidation of checkpoints you could get dropped off right outside your gate and walk almost directly onto a plane in about 10 minutes tops.
I’m torn on the upcoming redesign. I’d prefer that the security theater be dropped and the airport go back to the old security checkpoints, but I don’t see that happening. The current middle road doesn’t work well for any one not actually departing from or arriving in the KC area. (Though I would argue it’s still better than Orlando where it feels like it can take 20 minutes to go from one terminal to the other)
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Are they selling the truck?
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Yup - just got one of these because my sticker expired. Also, I got late fees because the ticket is due in 14 days or some such deadline, and I wasn’t back by then.
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Incidentally: stumbling across the occasional human corpse is an occupational hazard in my job. Mostly homeless folks who were living in the forest.
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“Hey, you’re not allowed to be dead here!”
“I’d better call the po-lice…”
Don’t most lots with ticket stubs take a photo when you first enter and tag it to your ticket stub? Then compare that photo with your car when you leave? That way, you can’t just walk up to the entrance gate, punch it for a new ticket and immediately drive out, being in there for only a reported few minutes.
You’d think they would put plate reading software on that for tracking purposes then. Hold that thought…
Though disk space is cheap, I wonder if photos eithet get automatically deleted after a long time, or flagged for someone to track down the car for towing.
Also, how long would you have to be there for until it’s just cheaper to claim you lost your ticket and pay the list ticket fee. Or do you think they’ll start to go back through the photos, looking for your plate?
And why haven’t they implemented parking fees based on automated plate readers? I ran into that a few times when driving around in England, and besides trying to remember the plate of my rental (I learned to take a photo of it early on), things were straightforward. Too many plateless cars in the US?
I hate to think that the bill is going to be.
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The Marriott hotel right at the airport runs a shuttle and will let you park in their lot for up to 30 days for about $40-$50, IIRC. We did this when we went to Japan for a couple of weeks. Much cheaper than the daily rate in long term parking.
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Yes, my friends often do this especially if they have an early flight. Cheaper and also less stressful, since our 2-hour drive to MCI (we’re in Columbia) can be done at leisure the night before. If it’s a relatively short trip (1-2 weeks), some of the airport hotels will let you park for free.
There’s your problem. This wouldn’t have happened if he chose one of the premium lots.
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" Astonishingly, they somehow missed it. "
False assumption that they even looked. Missing person reports are about forty seventh on the list of “fun hings to do today” for most cops absent suspicion of foul play.
At most, I’ll bet a unit drove around the perimeter for two minutes at normal driving speed, saw nothing and off they went.
They’ve integrated the statewide toll system with airport parking fees at my local airport, so one can just drive out if one has a toll transponder. One assumes this system has a backup plate-reading system for those people who mistakenly/intentionally pull out through the wrong lane; hopefully it charges a minor “you’re an idiot” fee for the “mistakenly” folks with toll accounts and a “you’re a freeloader” fine for the grifters. My point is that the airport definitely has the infrastructure in place to do this, as they already have the license plate readers (and those are on all lanes, not just the toll lanes).
The entrance, on the other hand, has only video surveillance of the ticket dispenser machines–and that equipment looks like The Beast That Ate Technology Past, with fifteen layers of airport soot on it. They’d be lucky to pull 300 interlaced lines from that junk. However, who knows, they may be crazy-like-a-fox and are using the terrible housing to hide state-of-the-art license-plate readers. I seriously doubt it.
Could it be he was just waiting for his DACA paperwork to come through?
