A scene too macabre for television news to air has Detroit Police trying to find out how an unidentified man died — and who he was.

Police said that at about 7:50 a.m. Thursday, residents reported an African American man, estimated to be in his 40s, dangling out of a large, partially open window in the 1700 block of Marantette in Corktown. Authorities found blood and broken glass.

"I can't confirm he was homeless," said Latrice Crawford, a spokeswoman with the Detroit Police. "But, he was found kinda halfway inside and outside a building through a window."

The image is a sad reminder of what the world saw of Detroit a little more than a decade ago, just a few years before the city went through the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history and downtown revitalization.

And despite progress, it also is a part of Detroit that city officials are still trying to fix.

Charlie LeDuff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and book author, posted a graphic photo of the dead body on Facebook along with some observations:

"This man was trying to get out of the fangs of the Detroit cold, his friends say. It appears he punctured an artery on the glass pane. Homicide is also investigating as a possible break-in. Whatever the case, it's worth remembering that homelessness and poverty are very real."

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The grizzly — although incomplete — story seems familiar, especially coming from LeDuff. In 2009, he wrote about another man's body, this one encased in ice in an elevator shaft of an abandoned Detroit building.

That report garnered national attention as an emblem of how far one of America's greatest manufacturing cities had fallen: From the car capital of the world to a wasteland where even the dead go unnoticed.

The dead man's fortunes, one news report at the time noted, reflect Detroit's.

In the past decade, homelessness in Michigan has fallen by more than 36%, a trend that is in line with national statistics that show a 29% decline overall during the same period.

But, it still remains a serious problem.

In 2018, the most recent year the data was available, there were 8,351 homeless people in Michigan, according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Of those, the majority, 7,452, were in shelters or transitional housing.

The poverty rate in Detroit, according to city officials, has been on the decline, down to 33% in 2018, from nearly 40% in 2015, but it is still almo three times higher than the national average of 12%.

In the photo that LeDuff posted Thursday, one of the window's panes is broken. The dead man's Nikes hover a few feet off the ground and the back of his pants legs are dusted with fresh-fallen snow.

Crawford said that after police and fire officials arrived, they went inside, found blood and broken glass. The unidentified man, she added, appeared to have cut himself on the broken glass from the window.

Why the man was trying to get into the building is a question Crawford said that the detectives will try to answer in their investigation. Investigators also will try to determine whether he bled — or froze — to death.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.