Crime Blotter
On Monday morning, March 1, a building super came across a suspicious black garbage bag outside an apartment complex in Queens. Inside the bag, he found the armless and legless torso of a man. Cops at first surmised that the arms and legs had been hacked off in order to prevent the victim's identification; the fact that the head was still attached, however, sort of put an end to that whole theory. A neighbor interviewed on Fox 5 that night admitted that he wasn't surprised by this sort of discovery in his neighborhood, blaming it on "the young people of today."
Another bag of body parts was discovered in a remote section of Paerdegat Basin Park in East Flatbush the following afternoon. The clear plastic bag, discovered by a park employee, contained a torso and legs. It's unclear whether or not the legs were attached. It's estimated that the bag had been moldering away for at least six months.
The head that was discovered nearby the following day may or may not have belonged to the torso.
Also on Tuesday, Wilfredo Lopez, 25, who'd long been telling his girlfriend, "If you leave me, I'm going to kill you," stayed true to his word. Twenty-year-old Betzaida Eva Madera, Lopez's longtime girlfriend and the mother of his child, made it clear that she just wasn't interested in seeing him anymore. So he went to her apartment in the Tremont section of the Bronx, grabbed two large knives, and stabbed her to death. He then cut her open and sliced out her heart, her liver and (according to some reports) her vocal cords.
An apparent follow-up suicide attempt failed, and Lopez was discovered ranting and raving in Crotona Park, his hands still covered in blood.
A 19-year-old Army reservist tried to do the same sort of thing to his 14-year-old sort-of girlfriend last weekend, but after having some trouble dismembering the body of the girl he'd already strangled and stabbed 50 times, he simply packed her body into a shipping container, drove it to Williamsburg and left it in a dumpster. In all the craziness, he apparently forgot that the box had his name and address on it.
In non-dismemberment news, a short transvestite exotic dancer was arrested on Sunday, Feb. 29 after assaulting a cab driver in the West Village. When lovely Carlos Sanchez learned that cabbie Barun Ghosh was off-duty, and so would not drive him anywhere, he removed one of his high heels and whacked Ghosh repeatedly in the skull with it. The partially paralyzed Ghosh was rushed to St. Vincent's neurological ICU in critical condition, and Sanchez was later picked up at the Hotel Val Arms in Chelsea.
Police report that the diminutive Sanchez had been arrested more than 30 times previously, on assault and prostitution charges.