Even after midnight, a guy on the train with a shopping cart full of stuff isn’t likely to arouse a whole lot of suspicion.
And, even if a weird odor is emanating from the cart, well, people on the train have smelled weird odors before.
Still, the idea that a suspected killer would stuff a dead body into a collapsible cart, roll it onto a commuter train and travel seven stops before burning the body under a suburban bridge is quite baffling — even for the Bronx.
But that’s what cops said happened last week in a grisly body parts mystery that is still unfolding.
Police are still looking for suspects who torched a dead, toothless body under a Yonkers bridge after transporting it on a Metro North train like they were carrying groceries.
Investigators used surveillance video to trace the trip back to a Bronx apartment, where, after obtaining a search warrant, they found a pair of severed hands in a bleach-filled crockpot and other body parts in a bag in a freezer.
Also complicating the mystery is that cops have not been able to identify the victim.
Emma Seiwell / New York Daily News
Burning body parts found dumped under a Yonkers bridge were traced back to a Bronx apartment where more human remains were discovered. (Emma Seiwell / New York Daily News)
“Whoever did this wanted to try their best to make sure the victim was never identified,” retired NYPD Chief Terry Monahan told NBC. “The reason anyone would take out teeth, hands and feet from an individual is to prevent identification. Once you remove the hands, you no longer can check fingerprints. You take off the teeth, you can’t check dental records to see who the individual is.”
The macabre mystery began shortly after 2 a.m. Monday morning under the Oak Street Bridge in Yonkers, near the city’s western border with Mount Vernon, where firefighters responded to a call about an object on fire.
After they extinguished the flames, they made a shocking discovery — a singed corpse with no hands or feet.
“Responding Yonkers Police officers determined that a body had been placed in a shopping cart and apparently set on fire at that location,” Detective Sgt. Frank DiDomizio said in a statement to the Daily News.
Although the fire was set in Yonkers, police there said the victim was killed out of their jurisdiction. So they transferred the case to the NYPD.
Investigators painstakingly traced the trip to an apartment building along Rogers Place near Dawson St., in the South Bronx, about 13 miles from where the first set of remains were found.
Cops quickly recovered video footage that showed two people rolling the body from the nearby Mount Vernon West Metro-North station.Another video showed two people rolling the shopping cart down the block on Rogers Place at 12:16 a.m. Monday — about two hours before the remains were discovered burning in Yonkers.
Obtained by Daily News
Footage obtained by the Daily News shows two individuals wheeling a cart down the sidewalk near the Bronx apartment building where human remains were found.
The cart is pushed along the sidewalk by a man wearing a baseball cap and a long-sleeved sweatshirt with a cigarette or a pen dangling out of his mouth. He is followed by someone in a bulky hooded sweatshirt.
After determining that the videos showed the same men pushing the same cart, and tracing their steps back to the building, cops executed a search warrant.
Investigators wearing white hazmat suits and powder blue booties found a handgun and drug paraphernalia in a bedroom.
They also found a pair of hands soaking in bleach in a slow cooker on the kitchen floor.They also found a trash bag in the freezer containing what they thought was a leg.
They also found the victim’s teeth.
“I have 34 years working in that building,” the building super said Tuesday. “I’ve never seen something like that in this building.”
He said the man who rented the fourth-floor apartment often rented a room.
“This apartment is two rooms. He rented one room to different people. Every time he bring people from the street.”
He said he didn’t know if the man renting the room was the same person as the victim.
Emma Seiwell / New York Daily News
NYPD investigators are pictured inside the apartment building on Rogers Place in the Bronx on Wednesday. (Emma Seiwell / New York Daily News)
The five-story walk-up sits at the corner of 163rd Street, where a mural pays tribute to the late rapper Christopher Rios, known in rap circles and in the Bronx as Big Pun. The site is a popular stop on Bronx hip-hop tours.
Now, the corner has gained new notoriety, joining the ranks of other body parts, shopping cart locales.
Cops found a body in a shopping cart in the Bronx nearly 10 miles south of Yonkers in August 2023. That corpse was wrapped in plastic.
In March 2022, police officers in Brooklyn discovered a woman’s dismembered body in a shopping cart outside a pawn shop in an industrial part of East New York near an elevated subway track.
