Yes Fat Chicks

After sexism and ageism, here’s fatism. Starting at 48 stone.

Night & Day, May 1988

El Cerrito is a rather dull little town in Contra Costa Country, about 40 miles from San Francisco. There are small schools, a Safeway store, low-rise apartment buildings, neat front gardens, and a lot of concrete. El Cerrito also has a small police department, used to handling a bit of car crime and over-excited teenagers. The station is less than 100 yards from an apartment block at 10944 San Pablo Avenue, the scene of the most unusual incident local officers can recall.

On the afternoon of November 19, 1996, Detective Donald Horgan and Commander Scott Mosby were informed by the ambulance service that a 13-year-old girl had died in her mother’s apartment. They arrived to find no ordinary girl: Christina Corrigan weighed 680lb (48st 6lb), and was naked except for a blanket on the floor of her living room. She was covered in sores and faeces.

She had been dead for only a few hours; the coroner concluded that she had died of congestive heart failure due to morbid obesity. Her mother said Christina hadn’t moved from her favourite spot in front of the television for several days. Marlene Corrigan, then 47, explained that her daughter simply found it too uncomfortable to walk around, or even visit the bathroom. When Christina had ‘accidents’, Marlene would clean them up. When she went out to work every morning, she would leave her a pile of food: eggs, bacon, steak, grapes, granola bars, fruit and vegetables, all in large portions.
The policemen took Polaroids and filed a horrified report. ‘The medium-brown carpet was cluttered with household garbage, videotapes, books and magazines, discarded food and drink containers, and was heavily soiled by what appeared to be urine and excrement.’ A cursory examination by Scott Mosby ‘revealed what appeared to be tissue decay on the thighs and lower abdomen’.

The police visited Marlene the following day at her parents’ house. Her father had died eight months before and her mother was in a nursing home, battling the last stages of cancer. Her husband was somewhere in Yemen, but they’d had no contact since he left 11 years before. Mosby and Horgan got a few more answers for their files; Marlene’s daughter hadn’t seen a doctor for a few years; she hadn’t been to school for a term; Chad, her 18-year-old brother said he hadn’t seen Christina leave the house for several weeks’ and Marlene said she hadn’t actually been outside for three months, not since she last visited the pool at the apartment complex.

She said that on the day her daughter died, Christina had complained of a heavy cold. She gave her Tylenol to reduce her fever and went out to buy the iced tea she was fond of. Marlene found her dead when she returned, 20 minutes later. Later, she remembered that Chad had mentioned a few days before that Christina should probably go to a doctor. She added, ‘I guess I was too late.’

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