Police: North Hopewell Twp. man found dead in pool
A 53-year-old North Hopewell Township man was found dead and frozen in the above-ground swimming pool to the rear of his home Tuesday night.
Chief Larry D. Bailets Sr. said North Hopewell Township Police were called to the home in the 11000 block of Crossroads Avenue at 6:38 p.m., after a family member found Mark Blizzard floating face down.
"The water in the pool was frozen over and it was obvious he had been in the pool for some time, as long as possibly 24 hours," Bailets said.
Blizzard's wife, 51-year-old Barbara Blizzard, said her husband did not work because he was disabled with Crohn's disease and had undergone 11 neck and back surgeries.
She had last seen him on Monday and hadn't realized he was missing until after the couple's adult son had returned from work Tuesday, she said.
Barbara Blizzard works unusual shifts at a McDonald's in Hampstead, Md., and had gone to sleep at 7:30 p.m. on Monday night, she said.
She hadn't seen her husband, to whom she had been married for 26 years, when she woke on Tuesday morning. She went Christmas shopping, figuring he had gone away without leaving a note, as that would not have been unusual, she said.
"I told him the night before I was going shopping," she said. "I just thought he went out somewhere."
After she returned from shopping and her son returned home, they determined that neither knew where Mark Blizzard had gone, she said.
"I asked if he'd seen him and he hadn't, and we decided let's look outside," she said.
The son found his father shortly after, Barbara Blizzard said.
She said she suspects her husband was tending to a tarp that was placed over the pool, and he must have fallen.
"We had ice on top of the pool on the tarp and he was always trying to fool with the tarp," she said. "We had holes in the tarp because of the weather, it was tearing, and he was always fooling with it."
Police and the York County Coroner's Office are trying to determine what happened, Bailets, the police chief, said.
The coroner's office said an autopsy was taking place Wednesday morning at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown.
The death is York County's second pool-related death in a week. Beverly A. Scott, who had been mayor of Dallastown since 1995, was found dead in her backyard swimming pool on Dec. 8.
Scott, 69, drowned and her death was ruled accidental by the York County Coroner's Office.
-Reach Christina Kauffman at 505-5436, ckauffman@yorkdispatch.com, or follow her on Twitter at @dispatchbizwiz.
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