In which I see a dead body

My roommate got home around 10pm. As she was pulling in to our road, she noticed an obviously intoxicated (drunk/high/something) individual wandering down the middle of our road. He was so out of it that he didn’t even react to her car. This happens a lot. Unfortunately, our neighborhood is close to a bridge, under which quite a few homeless people live. There’s also a fenced-off area at the end of our road, which is the property of the local electric company; a lot of homeless people live there, too. While I understand that homeless folks must live somewhere, it is definitely disconcerting when people who seem obviously intoxicated or obviously not-quite-right in the head regularly walk through your neighborhood. I have no problem with the non-crazy, sober homeless folks. Anyway, my roommate had basically come inside then gone right back out to her car when our neighbor, who had been outside talking on the phone, said she thought someone had just been hit by a car, but she wasn’t sure and was too afraid to go look. The neighbor called 911, and my roommate came and got me, and we went to check it out. It was the guy my roommate had seen staggering down our road, and he had obviously been run over. It wasn’t the first dead human body I’d seen in real life, but it was definitely the first that hadn’t died of natural causes. We were out there before the cops, before the EMS folks. The guy who hit him, as well as the woman who had been driving in the next lane over and had witnessed the accident, were there, frantically calling for help. The cops arrived less than a minute after we did, and the ambulance pulled up a couple of minutes after that. Apparently the guy had been standing on the edge of the road, and had staggered into the street directly in front of an oncoming truck. The driver had no chance of stopping or swerving. The medics attempted to revive the guy, but with no luck.

Because we essentially live on the corner where this happened, we stuck around. The cops got my roommate’s contact info, in case they needed to verify the way the guy was acting prior to the accident. The main road was closed for the entire block on our side of the road, and no one was allowed in or out of our street (which was inconvenient for some folks who needed to get out to go to work, or who were returning home late). We waited with the driver while he waited to be told if he could go or not, during which time several homeless people came by to find out what was going on, wanting to know what the guy had looked like, and if he was going to make it. White, shaved head, light grey or white shirt. And no, he wasn’t going to make it.