It sounds like the climactic scene of a horror film. A California sheriff’s deputy looking to make a next-of-kin notification after the unexpected death of 63-year-old Randall Freer expected to find the man’s elderly father.
Instead what he found was the deeply decomposed corpse of Ada Clinton Freer seated in a recliner.
Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Greg Stark said the elder Freer’s body had been there for more than three years, if the level of decomposition tells an accurate tale.
“It was severely decomposed with partial skeletal remains,” he said. “In my 28 years of law enforcement, this type of investigation is extremely rare. We don’t typically find someone who has been dead for so long inside a residence.”
An official cause of death is so far undetermined for the long-decaying body, according to Calaveras County Coroner Kevin Raggio, who identified the body as that of Ada Clinton Freer, 91.
It is believed that Randall Freer had kept his father’s body in the home the two shared in the Sierra Nevada foothills so that he could continue collecting his social security checks. Randall was listed on his father’s accounts and continued to deposit and withdraw the money until his sudden passing revealed the ugly truth about his father’s death.
Raggio confirmed with the Freer’s bank that the last time Ada Clinton Freer had personally signed a check was in 2016.
“The son assumed the dad’s identity, and I suspect that he was probably living with his dad and living off his father,” Raggio said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “When his father died, he discovered him and just left him sitting in the chair in the home and kept using his funds for his own purposes. In order to use the money, he couldn’t say that the dad passed away, so he was collecting Social Security and retirement.”
No foul play however is suspected in the death of Ada Clinton Freer.
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