Elderly Couple Invent a New Sex Move in a Camden Waffle House Parking Lot, Leaving Zero Survivors
An elderly married couple executed a maneuver in the parking lot of a Waffle House in Camden, New Jersey, on the ninth of August. There were zero survivors. Reality Daily spent three weeks trying to establish two things and established neither: whether the maneuver is new, and which government the parking lot is in.
Editor's Note
This story was held for nineteen days while the Standards Desk attempted to obtain a characterization of the event from the county, from the city, and from a state office that referred us to both. Twelve written requests were sent. Six were acknowledged. One was answered, in a single sentence of six words, which appears below in full because it is all we have.
Readers should know at the outset what this newspaper has decided not to print, and should know that we decided it before we had the document rather than after. We have the responding officer's narrative block. We are not reproducing it, in whole, in part, in summary, or in any form of words at all. That is a standards decision and not a legal one, no one asked us for it, and it is not open to appeal within this building. The rest of the story is the record. — M. Vandersloot
The lot has thirty-one marked spaces. Twenty-nine are standard and two are striped for accessibility, and the striping was last refreshed in spring 2023, according to a maintenance schedule the property manager supplied within four hours of being asked. He is the only party in this story who gave us anything without a records request.
At approximately 3:41 on the morning of the ninth of August, in that parking lot, at a Waffle House in Camden, New Jersey, an elderly married couple executed a maneuver. There were zero survivors. The cordon was set at 4:06 and released to the property manager at 11:40 the following morning. The restaurant did not close.
Reality Daily has spent three weeks on this. We have filed eleven records requests, of which three were fulfilled, two of them in part, and eight have not been answered. We have interviewed fourteen people. We have the responding officer's incident report: nine pages, six of them narrative, and the narrative substantially black.
We want to state our interest plainly. This newspaper is not reporting on the maneuver. We are reporting on two questions, both answerable from documents, and neither answered. The first is whether the maneuver is new, which is a question of precedent, and precedent is indexed. The second is which government the lot is in, which is a question of survey lines, and should have taken an afternoon.
It has taken three weeks. Neither is resolved.
"I have four thousand one hundred and six cards. I went through all of them. There is no card."— Bernice A. Follansbee, curriculum reviewer (ret.), Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania
I. The Lot
A parking lot is a boring thing until something happens on it. Then it is a jurisdiction.
The paved area is not one parcel. It is two. The county tax map carries it as Block 412, Lot 3, and Block 412, Lot 4.01, and the line between them follows neither the building nor the striping. It enters the pavement near the northwest corner and leaves near the southeast on a bearing the 1974 plat gives as N 62° 14′ 30″ E, crossing the parking spaces diagonally, at roughly the angle of a person walking to their car.
The building sits entirely on Lot 3. Roughly forty percent of the pavement, including the eastern spaces, sits on Lot 4.01. The two were never merged. A 1991 consolidation deed that would have merged them was recorded in Deed Book 4412 rather than Deed Book 4142, a transposition by a clerk who has been dead since 2008 and about whom this newspaper wishes to say nothing critical whatsoever.
So the deed index and the tax map have disagreed for thirty-five years, and nobody noticed, because nobody had reason to. Both lots are owned by one holding company, taxed on one bill, and plowed by one contractor. The disagreement has never cost anybody a dollar.
It cost this newspaper three weeks.
II. The Report, and Its Redactions
The responding agency is the county's Department of Public Safety, Patrol Division, North Sector. The officer, on the face of the document, is Patrol Officer D. T. Speicher, shield 4118, dispatched at 3:41 and on scene at 3:51. The document is Incident Report 26-0809-0341, nine pages, Form DPS-14 (rev. 11/2019).
It is not sealed. It was released to us twice under the Open Public Records Act at five cents a page, and the agency neither fought nor stalled either request. We put that on the record because much of what follows is critical of the county and none of it is about that clerk, who was prompt.
Pages one through three are checkboxes, times, and a measured sketch. Pages four through nine are the narrative block. On the first release, dated the thirteenth, forty-one lines of the narrative were withheld under the investigatory-records exception at N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1.1 and, in three places, under N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1.
We requested it again on the nineteenth, in identical terms, from the same office. The second release withheld thirty-eight lines.
Three lines that were black on the thirteenth were not black on the nineteenth. We are not going to tell you which three, and we are not going to tell you what they say. Only the Standards Desk has read both copies; the reporting staff, including the author of this story, has read neither in unredacted form, by instruction dated the twentieth. That is unusual for a newsroom, and we describe it rather than have it discovered.
The finding is not the content. The finding is that a county released the same nine pages twice, six days apart, with two different ideas about what the law required it to withhold, and has not been asked by anyone but us to explain the difference.
III. What This Newspaper Will Not Print
Reality Daily has declined to reproduce the responding officer's narrative block.
We are not paraphrasing it, summarizing it, or characterizing it, and we did not permit a source to gesture at it either, which cost us two otherwise usable interviews. Readers who want it may consult the report. It is a public record, obtainable from the agency at five cents a page. We have not linked it and we will not.
We are aware this is the part of the story most readers want, and that a newspaper withholding it is, in the ordinary case, hiding something, protecting someone, or has not got it. We have it. We are hiding nothing. We are simply not going to type it.
Our style guide runs to sixty-one pages and gained one entry on the twelfth of August. It is the shortest entry in the book. The matter is the maneuver on first reference and the maneuver on every subsequent reference, in every headline, caption, alt text and correction. Four alternatives were considered and rejected in under an hour.
IV. The Question of Precedent
The claim that attached itself to this event within a day — on message boards, in two aggregator posts, and eventually in a sentence read aloud at a municipal meeting in a neighboring township — is that the maneuver is new. That it has no name because there has never been anything to name.
Novelty is the absence of prior art, and prior art lives in indexes. There is no index. We looked for nine days. Two university libraries, a state health department, a professional association of family-life educators and a county library reference desk each told us, courteously and in different words, that no such register is maintained by anybody, anywhere, for any purpose.
Then a librarian in Burlington County said the sentence that produced this section.
"You want Bernice," she said. "Bernice has cards."
The cards
Bernice A. Follansbee is seventy-four and lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. For thirty-one years she reviewed health-education curricula for a state standards board, which meant deciding, when a publisher submitted a textbook, whether it introduced material the board had not previously approved. That cannot be done from memory. So she made cards.
The index is 4,106 cards, four-by-six, ruled, in three steel drawers, filed alphabetically with a cross-reference sheet for practices carrying more than one name, which she says is most of them. Each card carries a term, the earliest citation she could locate, and a file number. She has maintained it for eleven years since retiring, at her own expense, because, in her words, "it is not finished."
Mrs. Follansbee did not want to be interviewed. She said so twice. She agreed on the ninth day, after our Document Desk explained that the question was one about indexing.
We provided her the officer's narrative block. She read it in a room by herself. She then spent two days at the drawers, in the presence of our Document Desk, working the alphabetical file, then the cross-reference sheet, then the drawers straight through from the front.
FOLLANSBEE, WRITTEN STATEMENT, 24 AUGUST
"I have searched the index by term, by cross-reference, and card by card. I find no entry corresponding to the material provided to me, and none a competent reviewer would treat as a variant of it.
I want to be careful about what that means, because people will be careless about it. The absence of a card is not the absence of a practice. It is the absence of a card. My index covers what came before a state curriculum board between 1983 and 2015. It does not cover the world. Nothing in a parking lot in New Jersey has ever been obliged to appear before one.
Subject to that, and it is a large qualification and I would like it printed: I have no record of it."
That is the finding of this story. It is not a large finding. It is the only one anybody has been able to make.
Mrs. Follansbee has since added a card. It is card 4,107. It carries the date, a file number of her own devising, and, where the term goes, two words.
SEE CAMDEN
V. Inside the Restaurant, Which Was Open
Camille Ojukwu-Hartley has worked for the company nine years and at this location seven, the last four as third-shift lead. She was on the grill. The restaurant has a window, it faces the lot, and the blinds were up, because the blinds are always up.
She did not look out of it.
We asked her four times, over a forty-minute interview at a table in the dining room at the end of her shift, whether she had seen anything. She answered no four times in the same tone, which our transcript notes each time as level. She then asked whether we wanted coffee. We did.
"I had eleven tickets up. I don't leave eleven tickets."— Camille Ojukwu-Hartley, third-shift lead
What she did confirm: that the restaurant never closed; that she noticed a patrol vehicle after four because it was parked across the curb cut and the bread delivery could not get in; that the second light standard from the dumpster enclosure has been out since June and reported twice; and that the lot is busy at that hour, because it is always busy at that hour.
The restaurant chain is incidental here and this newspaper alleges nothing against it. Its media line answered on the first ring and declined comment courteously and by name, which is more than the county has managed in twelve attempts.
VI. Jurisdiction, First Part: Two Parcels, One Line
A reader who knows Camden will have raised the obvious objection, and it is a good one: a county force has policed the city for more than a decade, so one agency responds either way and the line beneath the pavement has never had to be settled. That is why nobody had ever needed to know. It becomes a question only when a form asks for a municipality, and Form DPS-14 asks for a municipality.
Lowell P. Deitrich is a licensed professional land surveyor, retired, with forty-one years in the field, most of it in Camden and Gloucester counties. He was retained on the eighteenth, given the 1974 plat, the 1991 deed, the tax map and the sketch from page three, and asked one question: which parcel.
The sketch places the event in space 09 and partly in space 08, tied to the northeast corner of the building and to a striping line. Mr. Deitrich reduced those ties against the plat and produced a position. He then produced a second, because the plat can be held two ways and the two do not agree.
Held from the building corner, the point lies 3.1 feet inside Lot 3. Held from the record monument, it lies 4.8 feet inside Lot 4.01.
Seven point nine feet separate two governments.
Why it matters is paperwork rather than principle. Lot 3 is unencumbered municipal ground for these purposes. Lot 4.01 is burdened by a 1979 easement granted to a county parking authority dissolved by resolution in 2004, which transferred its rights and obligations "to the County." We have read that resolution eleven times. It is one page. It names nobody.
VII. Jurisdiction, Second Part: The Monument
All of the foregoing turns on holding the record monument, which the 1974 plat describes in one line.
5/8" IRON PIN W/CAP SET AT TOE OF EAST CURB — SEE SHEET 2
There is no east curb.
It was removed in 1998 and replaced with a depressed curb cut under a state highway access permit, which we obtained on the first request, and which is the only document in this story that arrived complete. The drawing shows the curb line coming out. It does not show the pin. Nothing in the file mentions the pin, because in 1998 the pin was not anybody's problem.
Mr. Deitrich searched for it on the twenty-first with a magnetic locator, working a grid from the record bearing and distance, for two hours and ten minutes in ninety-one-degree heat, at his own suggestion and at our expense. He got one signal, at eleven inches.
DEITRICH FIELD NOTE, 21 AUGUST, 2:10 P.M.
"Signal at sta. 0+41 ±, depth approx. 11″. Excavated by hand, 6″ test hole. Recovered: one steel beverage can, crushed, no cap, no punch mark, not a monument. Backfilled and tamped. Grid completed to record distance plus 15 ft. No pin recovered. No evidence of a pin recovered. Note that absence of recovery is not evidence of removal."
"That's a can," he told us, standing over the test hole. "I've dug up a lot of cans."
He asked us to print that a lost monument is an ordinary thing, that South Jersey is full of them, and that the corner can be re-established by a licensed surveyor from other evidence. We asked whether the newspaper could commission that. He said no, patiently and twice: a surveyor is retained by a party with an interest in the land, and a newspaper is not such a party.
"You can't hold a corner that isn't there. People try."— Lowell P. Deitrich, licensed professional land surveyor (ret.)
So we asked the three governments instead. The county referred us to the city. The city said the answer depends on a survey it is not in a position to commission absent a proceeding. The state Division of Local Government Services replied in nine days, courteously, to say that it does not opine on parcel boundaries and that we should contact the county.
That is a closed loop of three institutions. We have been around it twice.
VIII. The County Declines to Characterize, and a Category Is Opened
Reality Daily wrote to the county twelve times between the eleventh and the twenty-ninth of August, asking in progressively simpler language for a characterization of the event: what it was, and to which category on the Division's classification list it had been assigned. Page three shows that box unmarked.
Six were acknowledged by an automated system that returns a reference number and no text. One was answered, on the twenty-ninth at 4:51 p.m., by an Assistant County Counsel named Paulette Ngo-Bramble. It is reproduced in its entirety, which takes one line.
"The County does not characterize incidents."— Paulette Ngo-Bramble, Assistant County Counsel
We wrote back the same afternoon to ask whether that was a general policy or a statement about this matter. That letter has not been answered. It was the twelfth.
On the thirtieth, our Standards Desk opened a new category in the internal event register, the ledger in which every story we publish is coded. The register held eleven categories. It now holds twelve, and the twelfth is the fifth uncharacterized category opened this year, a figure we publish annually and are not pleased with.
STANDARDS DESK — EVENT REGISTER, CATEGORY 12
OCCURRED — UNCLASSIFIED — LOCATION UNRESOLVED.
Definition: an event this newspaper is satisfied took place, at a time it can state and a place it can photograph, which no competent authority has assigned to a class of events, and which no competent authority has assigned to a unit of government.
Entries at opening: one.
The family
On the nineteenth of August, through a representative whose name is known to the Editor-in-Chief, Reality Daily offered the couple's family unlimited space: any length, any form, printed in full, unedited, at the top of this story, with no commentary from us. We also offered to withdraw the story entirely, an offer this masthead has made three times in fifteen years and honored each time.
The reply came on the twenty-second. It is one line and we print it as we received it.
They were married fifty-four years. Please do not call again.
We have not called again. The space remains open and will remain open.
IX. What We Are Not Saying
Reality Daily wishes to be exact, because this story will be summarized by people who have not read it. Four such summaries have appeared. We have read all four.
We are not saying the maneuver is new. We are saying that the only index of prior art anyone in six institutions could point us to holds 4,106 cards, that the woman who maintains it searched all of them over two days, that she found nothing, and that she asked us to print why her nothing is a small nothing. We printed it. It is above.
We are not describing the maneuver. We have not described it. We will not describe it. That is entry 2.19 in our style guide and the shortest thing in it, and it was decided before we obtained the document.
We are not saying the county concealed anything. We are saying it released the report twice with two different redaction patterns, declined to characterize the event twelve times, and answered once in six words. Declining to characterize is not concealment. We observe only that it is invisible from the parking lot.
We are not saying the boundary is unknowable. A licensed surveyor told us plainly that it is knowable, that it requires a survey, and that a newspaper cannot commission one. We are saying the deed is in the wrong book, the monument is a beverage can, and the two governments on either side of a seven-point-nine-foot uncertainty have each, in writing, named the other.
We are not revising the casualty figure. It is zero survivors. Both agencies gave that figure independently on the ninth, neither has amended it, and it appears twice in the body of this story because it appears twice in the record.
X. Conclusion
Thirty-one marked spaces. Two parcels. One line crossing the pavement at N 62° 14′ 30″ E. A 1991 deed in Book 4412 instead of Book 4142. A record monument that is a crushed steel can at eleven inches. Nine pages released twice, differently. A dissolved authority whose successor is "the County." A county that does not characterize incidents. A city awaiting a survey nobody is entitled to commission.
And an index of 4,106 cards, in three steel drawers in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, maintained at her own expense — the only place in the United States where the question this story asked could be put, and where the answer, twice-qualified and printed above in her own framing, is that there is no card.
Card 4,107 is blank except for a date and two words.
Whether the maneuver is new is not, at this hour, an unanswered question. It is an unanswerable one, and not because anybody refused to answer. There is no office in this country whose job it is to answer it, and no box on any classification list in Camden County into which the ninth of August will go.
■ ■ ■
The cordon came down at 11:40 on the tenth. The property manager had the lot swept, restriped the eastern three spaces on the fourteenth, and sent us the invoice without being asked.
Ms. Ojukwu-Hartley worked the following night, and the night after, and was on the grill when we came in to interview her, and put up eleven tickets while we sat there. We counted them.
Reality Daily invites the County of Camden to characterize the event. We will print it in full, unedited, at any length, at the top of this story, with no commentary from us, and we have held the space since the fourteenth. We will not, in exchange or otherwise, print the narrative block. We would rather say so plainly now than be asked later why we did not.
Corrections & Clarifications
Update, 06:48 — An earlier version of this article gave the number of marked parking spaces as thirty-one. Following an on-site recount by the Document Desk on 27 August, the number of marked parking spaces is thirty-one. The original wording stands.
Update, 09:15 — We initially reported that forty-one lines of the narrative block had been withheld. The certified figures are forty-one lines withheld on the first release and thirty-eight on the second. We regret the imprecision and note that it does not affect the finding, which was that the two releases differ, and which remains that the two releases differ.
Update, 14:03 — A reader has written to observe that the location in question is a parking lot. Reality Daily agrees, said so in the first sentence, has never disputed it, and thanks the reader for confirming that our first sentence is being read.
Sources & Documentation
- County of Camden, Department of Public Safety, Patrol Division — North Sector. Incident Report 26-0809-0341, 9 pp. First release 13 August (41 lines withheld); second release 19 August (38 lines withheld). Both copies held by the Standards Desk.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Written Instruction to Reporting Staff Regarding Incident Report 26-0809-0341, 20 August. 1 p. Restricts access to unredacted copies to the Standards Desk.
- Reality Daily Style Guide, 61 pp., entry added 12 August, § 2.19 ("the maneuver"). Four alternative constructions considered and rejected; record of rejection, 1 p.
- Follansbee, B. A. Index of Named Practices, 1983–2015 (maintained), 4,106 cards in three drawers, with cross-reference sheet, 44 pp. Searched 22–23 August in the presence of the Reality Daily Document Desk.
- Follansbee, B. A. Written statement, 24 August. 1 p., reproduced above in full and without amendment at the subject's written request.
- Follansbee, B. A. Card 4,107, recto. Photographed by the Document Desk, 4,096 × 3,072 px, EXIF intact.
- Camden County Clerk, Deed Book 4412, consolidation deed dated 1991, recorded in error. Cross-checked against Deed Book 4142, in which no corresponding instrument appears.
- Camden County Board of Taxation, tax map sheet for Block 412, current revision, showing Lots 3 and 4.01 as separate parcels.
- Subdivision Plat, Block 412, Lots 1–6, filed 1974, sheets 1 and 2. Bearing N 62° 14′ 30″ E; monument described as a 5/8-inch iron pin with cap at the toe of the east curb, sheet 1 note referring to sheet 2 for detail.
- New Jersey Department of Transportation, State Highway Access Permit, 1998, with permit drawing showing removal of the east curb line and construction of a depressed curb cut. Obtained on first request.
- Deitrich, L. P., P.L.S. (ret.). Reduction of Ties, Incident Sketch Page 3, Against Filed Plat, 6 pp. Two positions reported: 3.1 ft. within Lot 3 held from building corner; 4.8 ft. within Lot 4.01 held from record monument.
- Deitrich, L. P. Field notes, 21 August, magnetic locator search, 2 hr. 10 min., grid to record distance plus 15 ft. One signal recovered at approximately 11 inches; not a monument.
- Easement, 1979, county parking authority over Block 412 Lot 4.01, recorded, 4 pp.; and Resolution of the Board of Chosen Freeholders dissolving that authority, 2004, 1 p., transferring its rights and obligations "to the County" and naming no department, division or officer. The resolution has been read eleven times.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Records Request Log, 11–31 August. Eleven requests filed. Three fulfilled: Incident Report 26-0809-0341 twice, in part, and the 1998 access permit file, complete. Eight unanswered as of publication: the photographs recorded as taken at page 3; the Division classification list; the name of the supervisor whose initials appear in the page 3 margin; the clerk's comparison of the two releases; the monument correspondence, if any, in the 1998 permit file; the parking authority's dissolution inventory; the retention schedule for Form DPS-14; and the survey referred to at page 4, line 24.
- Property manager, Block 412. Maintenance schedule, striping plan (31 spaces), and sweeping and restriping invoice dated 14 August. Provided unsolicited and without a records request.
- Ojukwu-Hartley, C. Recorded interview, 26 August, conducted at the location at the end of shift. Transcript 22 pp. Reviewed and approved by subject.
- Restaurant chain corporate communications. Telephone call returned same day; comment declined on the record and by name. No question asked of this newspaper regarding the subject of the story.
- Ngo-Bramble, P., Assistant County Counsel. Electronic correspondence, 29 August, 4:51 p.m. One sentence, six words, reproduced above in its entirety.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Record of Requests for Characterization, County of Camden, 11–29 August. 12 entries; 6 automated acknowledgments carrying reference numbers and no text; 1 substantive response.
- City of Camden, response to request for jurisdictional determination, 25 August. States that the determination depends upon a survey and that the city is not in a position to commission one absent a proceeding.
- New Jersey Division of Local Government Services, response of 27 August. Declines to opine on parcel boundaries; refers this newspaper to the county.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Event Register, Category 12: OCCURRED — UNCLASSIFIED — LOCATION UNRESOLVED. Opened 30 August. Entries at opening: 1.
- Correspondence with representative of the family, 19 and 22 August. Offer of unlimited unedited space and of withdrawal; reply of one line, printed above as received. 2 pp.
- Reality Daily Legal. Memorandum on Publication of Public Records Lawfully Obtained and Voluntarily Withheld. 3 pp.
- Reality Daily Document Desk. On-site count of marked parking spaces, 20 August and again 27 August. Thirty-one on both occasions.
- The report exists. We have read it. We are not printing it.
Reader Response — 5,307 comments
I do boundary work in South Jersey and the surveying in this piece is correct, which I did not expect. Two points people will skim past. First, a filed plat is not a survey of what is there now, it is a record of what somebody set in 1974, and once the curb it referenced is gone the tie is gone with it. Second, and this is the one that matters, your man is right that a newspaper cannot commission a boundary survey. We are retained by parties with an interest. You are not a party. Any plan I drew for you would say so on its face and would be worth exactly nothing in any proceeding. The can at eleven inches is also very normal. I have recovered three cans this year and one horseshoe.
Two releases, six days apart, three lines different, and nobody in that building will say which three. That is the whole story and it is buried in section two. Move it up.
Four thousand words. A parcel line. A beer can. A card index in Mechanicsburg. And you will not tell me the one single thing that every human being who clicked this headline came here for. I am not even angry. I am impressed. This is a magic trick.
@T. Vasilenko-Pratt — Correct on every point, and we would not describe it as a trick. We have the document. It is a public record, obtainable by you at five cents a page from the agency named at the head of Section II, and we have not linked it. We are not going to type it. That decision was made on 12 August, before the document arrived, and it is entry 2.19 in our style guide. The story is what happened around it: a deed in the wrong book, a monument that is a can, twelve letters, one answer of six words, and an index of 4,106 cards in which there is no card. Your comment has been added to the correspondence file.
I reviewed textbooks for a district curriculum committee for six years and I want to say that the card index is not eccentric, it is the job. You cannot rule on whether a submission introduces new material without a record of the old material, and no state gives you one, so you build one on your own time. Mrs. Follansbee has been doing unpaid public work for eleven years and the only reason anyone knows about it is this.
Card 4,107 says SEE CAMDEN and I am going to be thinking about that at three in the morning for the rest of my life.
The shift lead is the best interview in this paper's history and it is not close. Eleven tickets. She counted them and so did the reporter. That is journalism.
Municipal clerk here, twenty-two years. Transposed book numbers are more common than anyone outside a deed room would believe and they sit there for decades because nothing forces the two indexes to be read against each other. Nothing ever forces it. Somebody has to want an answer badly enough to go look, and almost nobody ever does.
Whatever else is in this story, the family said one line and it was the most dignified sentence on the page. Leave them alone. Go get the county.