WWJ-TV (owned by CBS) rents a TV tower in Oak Park Michigan. It’s located on 8 mile road, just across the city line from Detroit, Michigan.
Tower
The tower stands 1063 feet, just a little shorter than the Empire State Building.
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Being so tall, it’s pushing the absolute range of TV – it extends well into Ontario Canada
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So you don’t want to be anywhere near a 200kw ERP TV signal (it was 5 Mw back in the analog TV days) But every once in a while, TV engineers have to go up the tower to change the lightbulbs, or clean off bird poop. Fortunately, most really tall antennas have an elevator built into them that takes you most of the way to the top.
So a few days ago, after turning the transmitter off (or way down) the engineers were riding up the antenna and something odd happened. There was undoubtedly an unmistakable odor. What they found was a young man dressed only in underwear and a T-Shirt dead on a platform part way up the tower. He had not used the elevator – he had climbed the tower on the outside.
The Coronor has ruled that the 23 year life of Lasharr Gullap ended in suicide – he died of blunt trauma from falling (or jumping) from the tower and hitting the platform on the way down. His familiy in Detroit had reported him missing on March 3rd.
With a name like Lasharr Gullap, you leave a pretty distinctive trail on the internet – but the only thing I could find was that he graduated from Booker T Washington middle school in Mobile, Alabama in 2001.
A little more Detroit orientation – Detroit requires its city employees (of which there are many) to live inside the city limits of the City. As the city grew poorer and less diverse after the 1967 riots, the unionized white police and firemen, and the middle class blacks moved as far away from downtown as possible. The NW corner is around 8 mile and Telegraph Road. Affluent blacks who didn’t have to live inside the city generally fled to Southfield to avoid the city income tax and the general corruption of the city government.
