WYANDOTTE (WWJ) - Three people were found dead outside in subzero temperatures in a single day in Wayne County.
Authorities on Thursday said man's body was discovered Wednesday afternoon behind a commercial building in Wyandotte.
This comes after, also Wednesday, a former Ecorse City Council member in his 70s was found dead across the street from his home in Ecorse while another 70-year-old man was found dead outside a home on Webb Street near the Lodge Freeway in northwest Detroit.
While it's believed all three fell victim to the bitter cold, officials at the Medical Examiner's Office say toxicology tests are now being run on the body of the Ecorse man.
Meanwhile, a source told WWJ Newsradio 950's Sandra McNeill that the remaining two bodies are still too frozen to conduct an autopsies to determine whether it actually was the cold that took their lives.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that number of deaths blamed on the cold across the Midwest has climbed to 13; although it's unclear if this figure includes the man found in Wyandotte.
Forecasters say the bitter cold hanging over Michigan the last two days was the result of a split in the polar vortex, a mass of cold air that normally stays bottled up in the Arctic. The split allowed the air to spill much farther south than usual.
A Wind Chill Warning for metro Detroit, warning of dangerous below-zero chill that could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes, expired at 2 p.m. Thursday. The actual temperature reached as low as seven degrees below zero in the city of Detroit Wednesday.