Body of grandma found at site of abandoned Pennsylvania mine
By Patrick Damp, Christopher DeRose
/ CBS Pittsburgh
CBS News Live
UNITY TOWNSHIP, Pa. (KDKA) – The body of Elizabeth Pollard, the missing 64-year-old woman who fell through a sinkhole while looking for her cat in Unity Township, Pennsylvania, has been found, the Westmoreland County coroner said on Friday.
Pollard fell about 30 feet below the surface of where the mine would have sat and was about 12 feet away from where the original sinkhole opened up, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Steve Limani said in a press conference Friday.
Pollard went missing around 5 p.m. on Monday and since Tuesday, crews have been digging, shoring up and searching an abandoned coal mine behind Monday’s Restaurant on Marguerite Road.
Rescuers held out hope she’d be found alive, but on Wednesday night, they informed Pollard’s family that the operation was moved into a recovery phase.
“It’s just a matter of trying to find her and do right by her family,” Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Steve Limani said at the time.
Crews feared the abandoned mine was going to collapse
As of Thursday night, search teams feared the abandoned mine property could be at risk of collapsing.
“The goal is to remove the dirt and then to come up from underneath and extract that dirt. We’re going to take that dirt and put it in separate piles. We’re going to have people reviewing that dirt, looking through it, possibly if we could find a cellphone or anything that could be of significance,” said Limani.
Police said on Thursday that the excavators reached the spot where they believed Pollard was.
At one point, more than 100 people had responded to the scene to assist in the massive search and rescue effort.
As for Pollard’s cat, Pepper hasn’t been found.
Patrick Damp is a web producer for CBS Pittsburgh. A Pittsburgh native who grew up watching KDKA-TV, Patrick studied journalism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After half a decade in sports communication, Patrick decided to pursue his dream of working in journalism in his hometown and joined the CBS Pittsburgh team in 2019.