When brothers Andrew and Sean Geaney took five models and photographer Owen Birrell to an abandoned Dunlop warehouse in Manchester, England, last July, the last thing they expected to find was a dead body.
The group had broken into the warehouse and, possibly because they didn’t want to land themselves in trouble for trespassing, didn’t report the body to police until six hours later, reports Metro.
In that time, they went ahead with their shoot in the presence of the body, took themselves for pizza and didn’t think to report the matter until one of the Geaney brothers’ girlfriends found out later that night and insisted on it.
The body has since been identified as 27-year-old Declan Noonan, who had been suffering from severe paranoia.
It’s an offence to fail to report finding a body within a certain timeframe, with the Manchester Coroner’s Court declaring that the group could have faced charges had they waited a few hours longer.
“We could have called, we should have called, but we didn’t,” Sean Geaney said at the inquest into Noonan’s death, which the group appeared as witnesses at. “We are not sociopaths. When we got home what happened hit us.”
