Woman found dead inside car parked outside Detroit grocery store

By Andrea Isom
Fox 2 News

UPDATE 1/3/2013: Fox 2 News has learned the victim is 47-year-old Ellen Marie Shea of Redford Township.  Neighbors said she was into drugs and may have recently been released from jail.

DETROIT (WJBK) -- For days, the same car sat parked outside a Detroit store.  Police made a disturbing discovery inside that car -- a woman's body.

"I noticed the car on New Year's Eve and it raised suspicion because at the grocery store, all the cars are off the lot by ten o'clock and there were two cars here and one eventually left on the first, but this particular car was still here and it just didn't seem right," a woman told me.

"I informed someone at the store.  Next thing I know, the ambulance was here and the police arrived and there was a woman inside and she was deceased."

An EMS crew smashed the glass trying to save the life of the person inside a bronze colored car.  A 47-year-old Redford woman is dead.  Sources told me her body had been inside the car since last year sitting in the passenger seat in the parking lot of the Old Redford Food Center on Grand River.

"It's extremely busy.  This is the number one grocery store around.  People walk to it.  Some people drive to it.  It's nothing but older people and senior citizens around, so I fear for the safety of my mother and her neighbors, and it just makes me wonder what's really going on.  What really happened.  Somebody knows something and they just need to come forward.  That could be someone's mother," the woman remarked.

Police are still working to figure out if this woman had been reported missing.  They do not believe she died of natural causes, although they did not find any trauma on her body.  The medical examiner will determine her exact cause of death.