Police in Harris County, Texas were surprised to find two bodies in a house, where they conducted a welfare check Saturday.
The first body belonged to an unidentified 63-year-old man who shot himself when police entered a Houston-area home around 8 p.m. Saturday, Harris County Senior Deputy Thomas Gilliand said on Twitter. The other body reportedly belonged to a 64-year-old man who had been dead for “several months.”
A neighbor to the crime scene reportedly called police around 6:30 p.m. to say it’d been months since he saw anyone enter the home next door. When deputies arrived, they noticed a foul odor and saw flies buzzing around the property.
“As they made entry into the home they heard one gunshot,” Gilliand said.
Inside the house, they found a freshly killed male with a self-inflicted gunshot in one bedroom and a “severely decomposed” corpse in an adjacent room. A forensic examination will attempt to reveal the latter’s cause of death. Police said both men appeared to live in the home at 16800 Kilwinning Dr.
Aftermath Services, a nationwide company specializing in crime scene clean-up, says human decomposition begins immediately after death, though factors including climate, shelter and submersion are factors in the expediency of that process. An unburied body vulnerable to flies and bacteria typically decomposes faster.
