MIAMI – Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel reporter Randall Buechner on Friday uncovered the dead body of what he said was “clearly a victim” of Hurricane Dorian in the empty condo next to his own Boca Raton residence, declaring the unidentified male as “technically, Florida’s only real fatality” of the Category 4 monster storm, pushing the total U.S. death toll from Dorian to one white person.
Buechner, a 14-year-veteran of the Sun Sentinel who has won numerous Florida Press Association awards for his articles on Fort Lauderdale’s growing problems with racketeering, gambling, prostitution and drug-running, said he stumbled upon the body after he heard “cries for help” while riding out Dorian’s lashings in the living room of his condo.
After checking on his neighbours to make sure they were safe and had ample supplies to ride out the storm, Buechner then turned his attention to the condo adjacent to his, which he said was owned by a “long-time friend” and for which he had a key so he could occasionally check on it “to make sure no vagrants, drug addicts, former or current male or female prostitutes, disgraced police officials or mafia scum that I got too close to while just doing my damn job” were crashing there.
Buechner said that although he had recently been told by the Sun Sentinel’s managing editor to spend more time writing award-winning stories and less time at the Hialeah Park race track underdog-betting his way to loserville, he did not feel any particular pressure to raise his profile at work by, say, inflating casualty numbers from Hurricane Dorian in order to win some scintilla of esteem from his journalism cohort. “The victim here – God rest his soul – clearly drowned from the torrent Dorian brought,” Buechner said.
When told that Dorian had only brought three inches of rain to the area as it barely skirted the Florida coast, and that the dead body had been found in the shower and not in any particular place within the condo that could have suffered a deluge, Buechner could only look down at the floor, shake his head and mumble, “A hundred fuckin people in Florida died in car wrecks this week but nobody’s investigating that.”
Buechner added that book found by local police on his boot-scuffed Maccasar Ebony coffee table entitled “Marked For Murder During an Excruciatingly Long Hurricane” was something he had just paged through and had not read in its entirety, so he couldn’t possibly have lifted the plot line and transmogrified it into something as gruesome and nefarious as a murder of someone like, say, his former editor, 87-year-old Tommy “Daddy Mack” Finkelstein, who went missing in 2015 after commissioning Buechner to write an enterprise story on the Miami rent boy scene.
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