A Colorado Springs Utilities employee sent to collect from a delinquent customer found out the hard way yesterday why their bill was overdue.

The customer was dead.

And it wasn’t a recent death. The body had apparently gone unnoticed for several months.

“There was obviously a stench,” utilities spokesman Gabriel Romero said today. “It was pretty bad.”

Romero declined to discuss why a utilities employee was visiting the customer’s home in the 700 block of South Circle Drive, saying it was against company policy to release customer information.

“One of our employees was there on business. That’s as detailed as I can go,” he said.

But e-mails obtained today by The Gazette show the employee, known as a collector, went to see the customer for a “collection visit.”

The employee “went to the door and saw that the mail person had put a card in the slot stating the property was vacant,” Field Service Supervisor Dianne Buchholz said in one of the e-mails.

The employee “knocked on the door and then looked into the house to verify if it was vacant. When he looked in, he saw the body in the living area. He contacted the Dispatch and they called the Police,” Buchholz said in the e-mail.

“We are shutting the water off and will wait until the investigation is complete by the PD before we disconnect the gas and electric,” she added.

City Councilman Tom Gallagher lamented the lack of neighbor-to-neighbor interaction these days and questioned why no one had found the body before.

“It had to stink. It had to,” he said.

“How many people walked up to the door and didn’t look in the window? The mailman? Previous meter readers? Neighbors? And none of them have a sense of smell? The body has been decomposing for more than a month, and no one called code enforcement? There are troubling issues festering right here in River City,” he said, referring to the musical “The Music Man.”

Despite the seriousness of the incident, Gallagher couldn’t resist a zinger.

“I wonder if we’re going to credit him back,” he said.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.