A foul smell coming from the trash outside a New York apartment building led police to a grisly discovery — a head and torso wrapped in plastic.
Construction workers called police on Friday after noticing a putrid odor coming from the garbage outside an apartment in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.
When officers arrived, they discovered a dismembered body stuffed inside a blue trash bin, according to the New York Police Department.
On Sunday, Christopher Moss, 38, was taken into custody and charged with concealment of a human corpse.
Moss’s relationship to the victim, who has not been identified, was not immediately clear. But neighbors said the two men were both roommates and a couple, and that they were often heard fighting.
“The apartment was in the short one’s name, and the tall one was always, like, violent with the short one,” neighbor Eduardo Lemus told CBS New York. “It’s crazy to think somebody would just, you know, do it and just leave the person right there.”
Several of the neighbors told local news outlets that the fights escalated in the past week.
“The last couple days, it was heated,” said Phyllis Larrier. “I think the other young man was not letting him in, wouldn’t let him, because he was banging on the door.”
But then the fighting abruptly stopped earlier in the week, replaced by the unmistakable stench that filled the hallway of the sixth floor.
“Last night when we came in … he was burning incense,” Larrier said. “That’s the first time I heard there was incense burning in the hallway. That’s unusual.”
“As soon as that door opened that whiff would just smack you in the face,” another neighbor told ABC7. “You’d be on the other side of the apartment from the entrance and you would still smell it. It definitely was the body.”
The building’s superintendent told police he saw a tenant place several large trash bags outside Friday morning, just before the discovery of the body parts.
The gruesome discovery has rattled residents in the area.
“Shocking. Very shocking,” said neighbor Thomas Williams. “Because I’ve lived here since 2004, and we’ve never had an incident of this magnitude in this block.”
NYPD has not released additional details but say the investigation is continuing.
