Questions are being asked - but there are few answers - after a woman's frozen body was discovered on a street in downtown Ottawa where she apparently fell into a snowbank. The coroner says she may have been lying on the street for two or three days before her body was discovered on Saturday morning.

An autopsy determined that the 54-year-old woman died of hypothermia and exposure within just a few feet of her apartment building.

It's not so much the thought that someone could freeze to death in downtown Ottawa that shocks Sandra Berg's neighbours. It's the idea that her body may have been lying on a busy downtown sidewalk for days.

Ravinder Jhandi owns a deli on the corner where Berg was discovered. "I still can't imagine how a body could be covered up with snow so fast, and nobody see it. That's the thing that's bothering me," he said.

The ugly thought that bothers many people in Ottawa is that maybe people did see Berg lying in the snow, and did nothing to help her.

When she was finally found by a neighbour on Saturday morning, she was covered in snow. Only a shoe was visible. So much snow fell in Ottawa last week that it's easy to see how that could happen.

Except that the last snowfall was on Wednesday night. And neighbours Jean Rossignol and Jimmy Boyd say they saw Berg alive on Thursday. "We saw her Thursday afternoon. Thursday afternoon, we talked to her. She was going down to the mail. She had a sweatsuit on and running shoes. She wasn't dressed to go out."

Whether Berg was buried by a snowstorm or by a snowplow, her death has shaken her neighbours.