(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

You check into a hotel room for work or even a vacation. Maybe it's one night, maybe it's two weeks. You text your loved one, I made it safely.

Then, silence. Hours turn into days. No one knows you're gone until someone knocks and no one answers.

In my line of work, I've seen it more than once. A military man, traveling alone, found his lifeless body, possible slip and fall in the shower. A long-term guest at a Hilton hotel, discovered deceased with no sign of what happened.

No foul play, no warning, just gone. This isn't an urban myth or a rare anomaly. It happens more often than you think.

In episode 15, I unpack the heartbreaking reality of dying away from home and why you need a plan. Because next time, it could be you or someone you love. Hello and welcome to another episode of Top Priority Chronicles.

It is a pleasure to have you join us. And if this is your first time, please subscribe so you are alerted every time we post a new episode. This week, we are exploring a topic that is not talked about nearly enough.

While people are born every day, every day someone tragically dies. But in this episode, I am addressing when people die in a hotel room and they are alone and away from home. This is a very, I like to acknowledge the sensitive nature of this topic and it's not one that I take lightly.

So I want to make sure I acknowledge that up front. Today's episode is titled Uncommonly Common, Dying Alone Away From Home. This stems from being a private investigator and being called to several incidents where a person who was traveling was staying at a hotel and the hotel went to service the room and found the person deceased.

The most recent case was a military man, specifically a National Guardsman who had come to town to do service work. He had been found in his hotel room when the hotel staff went to service the room. The gentleman did have military staff that had been alerted and were responsive to the hotel and also called and responded to the calls that something had happened and that they responded, came to the hotel and were able to identify their service member as well as alert their family members about the incident.

That is usually, that's a rare occasion. The other times that I have been called to the case or to the scene is when it's usually long after the person is missing. The family doesn't know where they are and the hotel room staff only goes into service long after the person has supposedly checked out.

I've had several cases, four to five of these cases throughout my career and it is not an epidemic, but it also isn't something that is rare. It does happen, not very common, but it's also, like I said before, not a rarity. The subject nature of this topic came near and dear to my heart because when I'm traveling, it is most times alone.

I'm traveling for my small business. I'm either traveling for work or I'm traveling to a conference or some kind of business-related activity. When I'm traveling on vacation, it's usually with my family, so I'm not alone.

But when I am traveling alone, I acknowledge the vulnerability to not always knowing where you are, where you're supposed to be, and if you are there. And just traveling alone creates increased vulnerability because you're not daily checking in with anyone. And if there was something to go wrong, there would be a delayed response because no one's expecting to hear from you every day.

And so hotel rooms, in a sense, can be viewed as invisible spaces because you're not monitored or after you check in, no one's checking for you and no one's looking for you. If you have health issues, if you have an accident or unknown causes can come into play. And so I think even if there was foul play, the evidence can often be hard to find the longer it's allowed to sit.

So I just encourage families to be mindful of this, to be thoughtful of this, and to be planful of this if you're traveling alone, if you're vacationing alone. If you're doing anything where you're going to be spending time in a hotel room by yourself, create some kind of, be mindful and forthcoming, and have someone that you trust in mind to be planning with. So when there is a death, the hotel has its own procedures of how it responds to such an incident.

Initially, housekeeping or other staff members may find the deceased guest. They're trained to not touch anything. They are trained to immediately secure that room and to contact 9-1-1.

Once they contact 9-1-1, they immediately contact their management. Their management then contacts their legal department or risk management and they usually will collect their own in-house statements from the staff who were involved, collect statements from everyone, and then they have them cooperate with law enforcement. And of course, they are really careful not to release any information to the public or to alert other guests when this is happening.

Their goal is to not cause an alarm. But when the police respond, they have their own procedure that they follow. And usually when police respond initially, they treat every death as a crime scene until they know otherwise.

So initially, they go on, secure the room and for their investigation. And then they conduct their investigation and depending on what they find, a cut and clear case of they're able to figure out what happened, how it happened, and there's no suspected foul play or that the crime was committed, natural causes or it was clear that something non-criminal had occurred. It's usually an open and closed case.

The police hand it over to the coroner's office. But if there are drugs involved or they suspect foul play, the investigation could take a lot longer. And it's just not as open and closed or cut and dry.

So they gather their evidence at the scene, which will drive their investigation. Then put off to the police, to other officers or to the medical coroner's office to notify next of kin that there has been a death. And hotels don't get involved in that.

But hotels do have to contact their insurance provider. And a lot part of their risk management is sending an investigator out to collect that initial statement from each of the employees that discovered the death or had any information pertaining to the death or any even involvement in cleanup afterwards to be able to document all facts of the case or descriptions of the room or anything that was found in the room or cleaned up in the room. So if a person dies of natural causes, like I said before, it's usually a cut and dry.

But if, you know, if it's drugs involved, suicide, suspicious activities or any weapons involved, the investigation is prolonged. And there's just a lot more that goes on with the case that is not. So it's usually not just a one size fits all.

It really depends on what's going on, which will determine how the police handle things. And then they contact a bio cleaning company is called in to clean up the scene. And usually that is associated with the hotel.

The hotel handles the cleanup. The common challenges with being found dead in a hotel room is the delayed discovery. If you aren't checking in with someone and a family member isn't looking for you and they aren't calling the hotel expressing any concerns, the hotel isn't going to find the person until that person is until that room is supposed to be accounted for.

And then how housekeeping is going to do their part to clean, get the room cleaned up to be able to rent, to make it available to be rented out again. So the challenge with that is if you're traveling alone, there could be quite a bit of time that passes before between the time you're supposed to check out and to be accounted for. And the time you leave.

And if that is the case, and depending on the weather, especially the more warm, warmer it is inside the room, it could increase the decomposition of the body, which could make evidence harder to find or deciding, finding out the cause of death harder to find with time passing. So, or making even a positive identification. So these things all really determine, come into play when there's a delay in the time the deceased passes to the time they're found.

And hotels will usually inventory the hotel and hold onto the guest's property and only releasing to the family or the police, depending on what the laws or requirements are for that state or that jurisdiction. When a loved one is found passed away inside of a hotel room, there is an emotional toll that it takes on the family. Especially when it is unexpected and any death is going to take an emotional toll on the family.

But when the person is young and thriving and it's an unexpected death, it has an extra layer of trauma to it and extra impact on the family. And so I want to be sensitive to that. And also the investigator's role when I come in and I'm working on behalf of the insurance company, and I'm trying to mitigate the insurance's risk by collecting written, I mean, recorded statements from all staff involved.

I'm also taking pictures of the scene and gathering any previous photos or evidence that was collected to be able to make an assumption or make an educated guess about what happened, what was the cause of death and to rule out foul play. So this episode is in no way an attempt to scare my listeners. That would be suicide to my podcast.

My goal is to alert you and to help you to be prepared. I don't think there's any such thing as being overprepared because once you know better, you can do better. And so I just say this to say, because family members, we take life for granted.

We take traveling, just going across town or across the country, across the world quickly and coming right back for granted. There have been several family members that traveled and didn't make it back home. And I just want to leave these four tips for people who are solo traveling.

And this is including myself because this isn't something that I really thought about much until I ran across this on the job. So my first one is going to be, let someone know your check-in and check-out dates. Be communicating with someone about where you're going, what hotel you're staying at, your check-in time, and when you're leaving, your check-out dates, what you're attending for.

You want to give someone all of these details so they know where you're at, what you're doing. And if you don't show up, they should be, it should give cause for alarm. Set a daily or regular check-ins with loved ones, whether it be a text message, email, a voice to text, get creative because I know everyone doesn't always have time to pick up the phone or maybe even to shoot a text, but create a shared system with a loved one, someone you trust to have a daily check-in to make sure everything is okay.

Share, I mentioned this before in tip number one, but share your hotel name, room number with someone you trust. Hopefully it's the same person that you're going to be sharing your check-in dates and times. Let them know where you're at, where you're going, what hotel you're at, what you're going there for.

If you can, a contact person at the conference you're attending or somebody that you went, that you're going to meet there, a fellow colleague or just a contact person that if they don't, if you aren't accounted for, this loved one could reach out to this person and say, have you seen them? And when was the last time you seen them? That information is vital in a death investigation. Leave emergency contacts clearly labeled on your person or on your phone. There have also been times when the police are unable to identify a person because they don't have ID on them.

Make sure you put your name on your phone. Maybe you make your phone, like if you lock your phone, put your name on the lock screen of your phone so someone can identify you in the event that you are not close to your wallet or your purse or anything that can identify you. So the first tip is let someone know your check-in and check-out dates.

Set daily or regular check-ins with a loved one. Share your hotel name and room number with someone you trust. And lastly, leave emergency contacts clearly labeled on your person or your phone.

You also want to put your name on your phone so you can be easily identified in case you don't have a wallet or a purse with you with your ID. I would love for this podcast to prompt a conversation between family members and loved ones to start having what-if scenarios. You can just never be too safe.

And I must say intuition is our best friend. And a lot of the time when you're prompted to do something, you might not think twice about it because you just got the prompting out of the blue. But sometimes our intuition knows something that we don't know and it's helping us to get prepared.

So if you've ever been prompted to safety plan with a loved one, to ask where they're going, to ask how long they're going to be there, do not take that prompting for granted. Make sure that you follow up with that loved one and you get the information that you're seeking because you just never know if your intuition is getting you prepared to help save a loved one or help find a loved one's body before it's too late. I appreciate you all chiming in with me.

This podcast episode has been one that's near and dear to my heart. Not only because I travel, but because I have family members. I have daughters and I have children that travel often.

And so this is something that I'm going to start to putting into place and to make sure that my loved ones know that I love them enough to safety plan with them, even if it never comes into play. It's always better to be overprepared than to be underprepared. I encourage you to create a solo travel safety card or emergency folder.

It is not something I've done yet, but after today's episode, it is something that I'm going to put into practice. And if it's something that you need or that you're interested in, DM me and I'll share with you whatever it is that I create for myself. I encourage listeners to share this episode.

Don't just listen, but re-share and share it again because we want our family members, friends to be prepared and not to be watching this on the flip side of something happening, but always to be ready and on guard and prepare for whatever comes our way. I invite you to reach out, share your own stories. If this podcast triggered you in any way or brought back memories, positive or negative, I encourage you to share with listeners why this is an important message.

This isn't just a podcast episode, but this is a call to action to make sure that our loved ones are prepared and have a plan of action in case death were to knock on any one of our doors, because we are a village and the more we know, the better we respond to these kinds of actions, but the closer we grow together. The whole purpose of me starting my podcast was to not hoard knowledge, but a lot of the times my cases open up information to me and they open up knowledge and help me to become more aware and that is the whole call to action today to making sure that we as a collective are aware and alert and ahead of the game. Death is going to come knocking on all of our door one day and we never know when that's going to be and so we all want to be looking out for each other.

It doesn't have to be just family members. It can be friends, it can be our neighbor, it can be a colleague, but we are our village and so we don't want to prolong anything like this. We want ourselves to be found sooner than later.

So again, share this out with your loved ones. Share this out with a friend, a colleague. Share this out on your social media.

Just share this so the message gets out that it is vital and important that if you are traveling alone that you create a plan. You just reach out to someone and say, I want to create a plan with you in case anything happened on my trip and then you encourage somebody else to be mindful. I just want to reiterate how unsettling this conversation can be.

Just talking about death period alone is something that can be scary and I think a lot of even old school mind of thought is that if you talk about death, it'll happen. That's just not true. Death is going to happen anyway.

So I think talking about it can only help us be more prepared for it instead of being afraid of it, not planning for it. I would say that was a common theme of the past is that many people died and were not prepared and I would love for that to no longer be a common theme, but to be a thing of the past is that it wasn't expected, but we were prepared. And so that is, again, the goal of today's episode is to get us prepared ahead of time and not after the fact.

I want to just reinforce how awareness saves lives and it also cuts down on bodies being left in hotel rooms to decompose and evidence not being found timely enough to discover what really happened. So I want to thank you for your time and for chiming into this episode. It's been my pleasure to spend time with you and to share knowledge with you and the wisdom that I've gleaned from my investigation experience and just sharing another tough truth.

But my goal is to share my truths with you. And before I head out, I would be remiss to not make sure my audience knew that I recently released a new book. It's called The Truths We Hide and I've had lots and lots of community support, but I want to make sure that this information gets out wide around the world.

It's my own personal journey of self-love and healing that I would like to share. I also created a trigger journal that is the accompaniment of The Truths We Hide and I would love, love for you to support, support, support, even if you don't need it. If you're already healed, share the book out with others or maybe even take a read to make sure that you've crossed all your T's and dotted all your I's and then share the book with someone else who may need it after you.

It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. Like and subscribe the video so you are alerted every time a new one comes out. And if you have any episode ideas that you'd love for me to explore, please shoot me a message, jump on my website, toppriorityinvestigations.com, shoot me a message, email me.

You can watch this on any podcast platform that's showing it or YouTube on my podcast channel on YouTube. Thank you and I'll see you next time.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)