OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
2:21 PM – Friday, December 6, 2024
A 64-year-old woman who fell into a three-story-deep sinkhole in western Pennsylvania, whom authorities have been searching for days for, was sadly discovered deceased.
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Elizabeth Pollard, 64, drove to Union Restaurant in Marguerite, a community in Westmoreland County about 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, on Monday, Dec. 2nd, 2024, at approximately 5 p.m.
According to her son, Axel Hayes, Pollard was a cat lover who drove to the restaurant at approximately 5 p.m. on Monday in an attempt to find her cat, Pepper.
Pollard frequently took care of her 5-year-old granddaughter, driving herself and the young girl around town in her black Chevy Equinox while the girl’s mother was at work.
From her house, Pollard drove down the hill to the parking area of a restaurant. It is not mentioned in the report why she believed that her cat was roaming around in this specific area.
There, she asked a few men that she introduced herself to if they had seen Pepper.
Police have hypothesized that she might have inadvertently stepped directly onto a patch of grass that barely covered the huge sinkhole, a wide hole in the ground “that was left behind by heavy coal mining that ceased in the early 1950s.”
On Monday night, the temperature in the region fell below freezing, according to NBC News. Meanwhile, Pollard’s 5-year-old granddaughter waited for her to return to the Equinox restaurant parking lot before eventually falling asleep. The fact that the child did not exit the vehicle and walk roughly 20 feet to the sinkhole in order to look for her grandmother is regarded by investigators as highly lucky.
Soon after, the young girl’s mother called 911 and reported them both missing at around 1 a.m., around eight hours after Pollard was last seen, according to Hayes.
Two hours later, state police found the car and they discovered the sinkhole soon after. Neither the men that Pollard spoke to nor the staff that were in and out of the shuttered restaurant on Monday had noticed it, police noted.
“With an entrance then the size of a sewer manhole cover and tufts of grass on the perimeter, authorities have surmised it is a fresh hole. Her own weight may have been what caused it to open up right beneath her, or it may have simply been hard to see in the twilight,” according to NBC 10-Philadelphia.
Two troopers knocked on the car window to awaken the 5-year-old and take her back home to her mother. According to police, she is now back home peacefully with the rest of her family.
In the search crew’s beginning attempts to look down and search for any indication of Pollard, which were unsuccessful, a fire chief was soon strapped in and secured securely with a ladder, in case he had to scramble to the surface.
Access to the sinkhole’s rim was strictly restricted and intensively watched since the whole search operation was regarded as extremely dangerous.
A day later, the local municipal government, Unity Township, approved emergency spending to purchase equipment for the risky subterranean search. State representatives with knowledge of closed mines were consulted.
In the hopes that she was still alive, the team started pumping oxygen into the hole. Through the tangle of old mine tunnels, they attempted to reach the location where they thought she had fallen, widening the hole.
The digging turned into a tiresome, frustrating task. As the team labored to extract a massive amount of rock and soil, they attempted to soften the earth with water. The mine shaft had buckled in some places and collapsed in others. No sounds were picked up by electronic monitoring and only one shoe was discovered by cameras that were dropped down into the hole.
To gain a sense of the position of routes that seem to intersect right below the sinkhole opening, the team reviewed maps that were almost a century old.
Authorities concluded by Wednesday that Pollard’s survival following what may have been a devastating plunge into the abyss was doubtful. Even with their efforts to bring in fresh air, the oxygen levels in the hole were still dangerously low. Additionally, there was no trace of Pollard when the team managed to investigate the location where they believed she could be.
Risky rescue attempts that would worsen the incident were soon halted, and the focus was shifted from trying to save Pollard to attempting to recover her body.
They informed the family that she is most likely deceased and went into detail regarding how they would be retrieving her body.
“I’d rather not anybody else get hurt,” Hayes told police after their search began to seem futile.
Hayes, his wife, and his father were at the Pollards’ house by Thursday morning, anticipating a police update. In the hopes that she had miraculously survived, they were praying for a miracle.
According to Hayes, Pepper, the cat, has not yet made an appearance.
“The cat was definitely attached to her,” Hayes said. “And he’s not going to leave the area until she’s found.”
State police announced that they had finally located Pollard’s body on Friday. At a press conference in the afternoon, they are anticipated to provide even more information.
64-year-old Pollard spent a large portion of her adult life in Unity Township, but she was raised in Jeanette, which is roughly 12 miles away. She worked at Walmart for over ten years and was regarded as a kind, cheerful individual. In a two-story house on Dos Drive, she and her husband of almost forty years, Kenny, had previously adopted two baby boys and raised them.
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