The body of a dead and decaying man was found this evening stuck in the burglar bars in the window of a downtown Birmingham warehouse.

Court VanScyoc, president of Cool Breeze Inc., made the gruesome discovery at his business in the 400 block of First Avenue North just before 5:30 p.m. VanScyoc, who runs the heating and cooling company, said he stopped by the warehouse to pick up some supplies and noticed a foul odor.

"I thought, 'Well, we've got rats,''' VanScyoc said. "We walked into the back warehouse area and kept talking about the smell, and then we just happened to look up. "

"We looked up and we saw a man hanging from the window,'' he said. "He was obviously dead. I knew he was dead, and I knew he was a burglar."

The man, an adult black male who hasn't been identified, was half in and half out of the window. From the outside of the building, the window is accessible from the ground level. On the inside of the warehouse, however, it's at least 12 feet off of the ground.

"He had cut the bars but he didn't cut them the right size and it looks like he got impaled and stuck,'' VanScyoc said. "His head and his arm were hanging outside, his feet inside. I think he climbed in, didn't feel ground beneath him, his weight shifted and he got impaled."

VanScyoc and police said they didn't know how long the man had been there, but said he was in the advanced stages of decomposition. "I've been here for the past couple of days and I started smelling the smell but I never noticed the man was up above the line of sight,'' he said. "We just come in and drop things off and pick things up."

The business owner said he is in shock and disbelief. "I'm shaken up. My adrenalin is going,'' VanScyoc said. "It's going to be a picture I'm not going to be able to get out of my mind for some time."

Birmingham police Sgt. Bryan Shelton said police received a call of a body in a window at 5:26 p.m. "It's not every day you find a body in these types of conditions, but it's something we're accustomed to dealing with,'' he said. "We will fully investigate the circumstance behind this death to give his family some peace."