BATON ROUGE - A man was found dead near a public golf course late Thursday morning. 

Police said the discovery was made around 10 a.m. in the parking lot of the City Park Golf Course along Dalrymple Drive. The body was found inside a vehicle.

Dr. Kimberly Dicks discovered the body while on her daily walk at the park with her friends.

"Tuesday, we noticed the vehicle there, and we didn't think anything of it," Dr. Kimberly Dicks said. "We came out here today, we parked and we saw the same vehicle, and we just looked inside the vehicle and was like, 'he looks like he's dead.'"

Sources said the body had likely been there for days.

Police launched an investigation late Thursday morning and said the vehicle had a temporary license plate and what appeared to be drugs inside.

An official cause of death was not released, but officers say the man may have died from an overdose.

Frequent visitors to the park were shocked to hear a dead body could go unnoticed for such a long period of time.

"Due to the fact of the traffic in and out, and the park rangers, and the police when they pass, they didn't notice the car was sitting there," said Catherine Taylor, who walks around the lake daily.

BREC employs park rangers who patrol the lakes, but they declined to comment because of the active police investigation.

BREC says the rangers leave citations on vehicles left on the property for extended periods of time, but authorities have yet to figure out how this went unnoticed and how the man died.