Bayou Body Count: Dead Bodies In Cars, A New Trend

​At 3 a.m. this morning, a Harris County Sheriff's deputy was prowling the streets around Bammel North Houston and State Highway 249 looking to nail some drug dealers. Driving along, suddenly he thought he saw a deal going down.

The deputy followed a suspicious car for a while, but when he tried to pull over the maroon Chevy Impala, the driver took off down Highway 249. Eventually, the driver stopped, jumped out of the car and ran away on foot, authorities say.

But wait, that's not all. After all, what would this blog be without a dead body, right?

Once the chase was over, the deputy returned to where he first saw the suspected drug dealer. Then he noticed something he hadn't noticed before: a dead man in the southbound lanes of Highway 249. His name: John Froehlich, 37.

Investigators say they do not have many leads. They believe Froehlich may have been trying to buy drugs when he and the dealer started fighting. When Froehlich tried to leave, investigators say, the dealer shot him and drove off.

On Tuesday morning at about 7 a.m., a Houston policeman was working around the 5000 block of Neches when he saw a gray Buick Park Avenue pulled over on the side of the road with its hazard lights blinking. When the officer peeked inside the car, he saw a dead man slumped over in the driver seat.

Police say the man, whose name has not yet been released, had been shot in the stomach. A gun was found wrapped in a towel sitting on his lap, police say.

View Larger Map

The Harris County Sheriff's Office has a new murder investigation that may actually turn out to be quite old.

On Monday, deputies found an abandoned car at 12028 Crosby Lynchburg Road with a corpse inside. It was the body of Stacy Ladson, 38, in the 2003 Lincoln Navigator, and it appeared as though it had been sitting there for some time, authorities say.

At first, deputies could not tell if Ladson had been injured because the body had decomposed so much. But the county medical examiner was able to figure out that Ladson had been shot and was the victim of a homicide, authorities say.

View Larger Map

If you have any information about these investigations, please call Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.

View Bayou Body Count in a larger map