Sanitation workers in NJ find dismembered bodies of man, woman in garbage bags

Sanitation workers find body parts in NJ trash

LINDEN, N.J. — Police are trying to learn the identities of a man and woman whose dismembered body parts were found Monday stuffed in bags and dumped on a quiet residential street in northern New Jersey.

Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow says the body pieces were distributed among four cloth laundry bags and two black garbage bags that had been left along a curb near an intersection of two residential streets in Linden.

The bags may have been there since Thursday, according to Romankow and neighborhood residents. Police were notified Monday morning, when a resident called to complain that the bags had been left in the street.

Police and public works employees responded to the scene, and a sanitation worker opened one of the bags and saw a body part, Romankow said. He said the investigation was continuing as a presumed homicide, but police did not believe the crime occurred in the neighborhood where the bodies were dumped.

Autopsies still were under way late Monday, with preliminary results showing the male to be Hispanic and between ages 30 and 35. Details about the female victim were not known as of Monday evening.

Resident Carol Thomas-Garretson said she reported the bags to police Monday morning.

“I didn’t call until I started noticing the flies,” she said. Thomas-Garretson said she first saw the bags Thursday morning, stacked curbside by the side of her house. She assumed someone had driven into the neighborhood to dump garbage, a problem in recent months. When the normal garbage pickup was suspended for Good Friday, Thomas-Garretson said she had planned to wait for Tuesday trash pickup, but the flies were intense.

“It’s very disturbing,” she said. “Nothing like that happens around here.”

Linden Police Chief Michael Boyle said homicides are rare in the town and that the discovery was in an area he described as “a very quiet, tree-lined neighborhood.”

“It was obviously a gruesome find,” he said.