10 Heartbreaking Details Surrounding Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada, Whose Remains Were Found Behind A Cooler A Decade Later

6 /10 Three Silent Years

As the years passed, Larry’s supermarket to work ceased its operations and closed its doors in 2016. It is essential to dwelling on this fact for a moment.

For three long years, the site was closed. It is difficult to ascertain what is harder to swallow: the idea of customers buying and going around as Larry’s body decomposed behind the coolers, or the idea of the former supermarket empty, silent, acting as a grave for the body of one of its former employees.

5 /10 The Gruesome Surprise

Only in 2019, after a contractor was hired to remove the remaining coolers and shelves, he was finally noticed.

Upon removing one of the coolers, the significantly decomposed, mummified body of a person fell to the ground in one piece, still wearing his blue shirt and beige pants.

However, due to the advanced state of decomposition, he couldn’t be identified right away: between January 24 and July 22, he rested in a morgue as a John Doe.

Only on that day of July were his parents finally scheduled to identify him, which they did amidst bitter tears.

4 /10 What Happened?

Looking back on the situation, it’s probable that what happened was that a frightened Larry sought refuge from his persecutory hallucinations by jumping and creeping behind the coolers, where he, however, became trapped.

The coolers produce so much noise that when he screamed for help, he couldn’t be heard. For an unspecified amount of time, that is where Larry languished.

Upon his death, the heat and air that came out of the back of the coolers served to mummify his body instead of allowing it to go through the normal processes of decomposition.

3 /10 Storage Space

According to other supermarket employees, this (climbing the coolers to access the space behind) was a common practice. Behind the coolers existed an area mainly used for storage.

This simple fact reveals a concerning feature of this case that has been unexamined for the moment, which is the extent to which work safety standards were enforced (or not) in that workplace. Perhaps with just a bit of extra oversight, Larry could have been saved.

2 /10 An Unlikely Case

Sergeant Brandon Danielson of the local police, though, noted that these situations are, in fact, scarce: “You don’t hear about these types of cases, people found in walls, especially in this area. We have missing persons all the time, but this is just unique.”

Indeed, only a few cases like Larry’s own are known. They are often widely reported: the case of a couple of British elderly sisters who died trapped by their folding bed in Spain, for example, was one of the shocking news of the same year in which Larry got stuck behind the coolers at his workplace.

1 /10 A Mother Knows

For all the mystery that surrounded his ten-year-long disappearance, sergeant Danielson did notice an important fact.

Even though they had checked the No Frills supermarket during the first days of the investigation and didn’t found anything of notice, “the mother, she kind of had an idea that he had never left the No Frills. I don’t know how she came up with that idea”, said Danielson during an interview. Perhaps, in the end, it may be true that a mother always knows best.