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 …
