Yes. But the issue, IMO, isn't the initial accidental fall into an open manhole, it's navigating a hard right angle into the much narrower lateral pipe at the bottom of the manhole.
For Caleb to have drifted into the lift station wet well some considerable distance away, his body had to decompose sufficiently enough to be washed through that lateral pipe. I have visited this question in earlier posts, but months later, I'm still not able to accept that this is actually what happened, for the following reasons:
(And for this review of hypotheticals, let's just assume that, in the middle of a March night, Caleb experienced a completely unprotected accidental fall into an open manhole in the crop field across Ennis Joplin Road from his apartment at The Cottages.)
If he falls in head first, maybe he's rendered unconscious or even breaks his neck. Either one explains why nothing is heard from the manhole in the next couple of days as volunteers, LE and police cadets are walking grid searches.
If he falls in feet first, I think it's more likely than not that he survives for a while. This makes it difficult to understand why nothing is heard from the manhole in the next couple of days as searchers are out in full force. To this day, we still don't know what happened to Caleb's phone, but if it was with him in the manhole, he wasn't able to use it to call 911.
Dead or alive, I think we have to accept that Caleb's body would be far too big to drift into a 10 or 15-inch lateral pipe, so we can assume it stayed there at the bottom of the manhole for weeks, decaying. I think I can believe that the location of that manhole was remote enough that smells rising from it may have been missed, but that field was searched and that field was used. After all, on April 17th, a woman noticed the uncovered manhole and contacted LE.
As we know, LE investigates that manhole on April 18th. They find nothing. They don't find Caleb and they don't find his phone. Further, they drain the manhole and find nothing, seemingly not one trace of evidence of human remains.
A little more than six weeks passed in the interval from the night Caleb vanished to the day the manhole was searched by LE. To accept that the manhole is how and where Caleb died, we have to accept that his body decayed so much between March 4th and April 18th that it and its clothing could wash into the narrow lateral pipe, navigating a hard right angle, and then be swept all the way to the Perry Place lift station, into the wet well, to finally be discovered, another six-plus weeks later, as a still partially intact skeleton.
LE drained the incoming lateral pipe and also drained the lift station well in the days after Caleb's remains were discovered. As far as I know, they didn't find his phone.
For me to accept the above hypotheticals, I'd need to see the final, complete autopsy and schematics of that manhole, the lateral pipes connected to it, and a detailed map of water sources carried to the lift station, as well as schematics of the lift station itself. Without that information, and without knowing the whereabouts of Caleb's phone, I still find it more probable that he was killed by a bad actor and either dumped directly into the lift station through its outer access panel or dumped in a body of watery that drains to it. JMO.
Not a week has gone by that I don't think about this sad, sad case.
