Pennsylvania grandmother is found dead days after fall into sinkhole, police say

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — The body of a Pennsylvania woman believed to have fallen into a fresh sinkhole this week while searching for her cat has been found in a long-abandoned mine that the sinkhole exposed, state police said Friday.

Elizabeth Pollard, 64, was found dead Friday in the mine in the southwestern Pennsylvania community of Marguerite shortly after 11:00 a.m., Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said. Crews still were working to recover her body early Friday afternoon, he said.

Pollard’s family has been notified, Limani said.

“The family … kept telling us, ‘We really want to have the body back so we can lay her to rest,” Limani said. “As a group, we just really wanted to make sure that we were able to do that.”

Pollard’s body was found “not far away from where we believe that she’d been when she fell through the sinkhole,” Limani said. “It was just a matter of the work to remove all the dirt.”

At a news conference Friday afternoon, local officials said they had to use heavy machinery to extricate Pollard’s body from the mine after it began to collapse.

The discovery ends a dayslong search that started early Tuesday when, according to state police, a relative told authorities that Pollard and her 5-year-old granddaughter had left in a car to look for her cat Monday afternoon and had not been heard from since.

Police who were looking for the woman then discovered her vehicle early Tuesday – with her granddaughter unharmed inside after being there nearly 12 hours – parked near a restaurant. A fresh, deep sinkhole was just steps away.

That spurred a rescue mission, part of which involved workers pumping water through a long-abandoned mine at the site to clear out debris, then removing it with a vacuum to make it easier to see what was underground. But by Wednesday evening, state police said they no longer expected to find her alive, saying cameras and sound detection equipment failed to pick up signs of life, and that the compromised conditions of the mine made it too dangerous for rescuers to continue with the techniques they’d been using.

The sinkhole where Pollard was believed to have fallen is in an area with limestone bedrock and had almost no ground left, state police said. The sinkhole likely appeared at some point Monday, officials said.

Two abandoned mines are near the sinkhole, a federal database shows. They are designated as posing “highest danger to citizens’ lives” due to land safety and environmental concerns, according to the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs.

Mike O’Barto, chair of the Unity Township board of supervisors, said his tight-knit community, which includes Marguerite, is grieving.

“We’re made of several old coal mining towns,” he said. “And when people suffer, we all suffer. My hope is that a tragedy like this never happens again.”

Trooper Limani described the mine complex where Pollard was discovered as “almost like a mini town underneath this town.”

He said engineers from the state department of mining will soon begin the long process of backfilling and shoring up the mine to try to prevent another accident.

Sinkholes usually form due to groundwater slowly eroding the underground rock that holds soil together, and Pennsylvania is particularly prone to sinkhole damage because of its limestone bedrock, according to the US Geological Survey.

CNN’s Lex Harvey and Andy Rose contributed to this report.

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