Man drives around drinking with dead friend for 3 days

Sherlock Holmes’ powers of deduction were the stuff of legend.

At the other end of the Bell Curve is Jerry Maestas, 64, who told New Mexico police he did not notice his friend, riding shotgun in his car for three days, was dead.

Jerry Maestas "isn't running on all cylinders," said police.

Maestas, a retired prison guard, didn’t seek help until he noticed his silent friend’s back had turned blue, according to this ABC article. That’s when he pulled into a Espanola, N.M., hospital and asked for a wheelchair for his friend, who he thought was sleeping.

Lt. Christian Lopez said more observant folks immediately noticed an overpowering stench, a horde of flies and the decomposing body of Amy Marquez, 33.

Like cheap tequila, I find Maestas’ tale hard to swallow.

Is he nuts?

“He’s not all there, I guess. I have no confirmation that he has a mental illness but this guy isn’t running on all cylinders,” said Lopez.

Maybe it was the booze? Maestas admitted he and Marquez had been drinking and he’d been driving around aimlessly for days. He didn’t think anything was amiss because Marquez, a paraplegic, can’t move the lower half of her body. And because he knew she wore an adult diaper, he didn’t think she needed a pit stop.

Officials determined she’d been dead about 66 hours. She likely died because of  ”positional asphyxiation,” Lopez said, who explained that people who suffer from paralysis don’t get signals to their brain alerting them to a body position that may be cutting off their oxygen supply.

Maestas was charged with a misdemeanor, failing to report a death.