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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, AUGUST 11, 2019
JAW-DROPPING DISCOVERY
Jawbone uncovered in Floyd Bennett Field linked to dead body found three years ago
BY ROSE ADAMS
A volunteer cleanup crew discovered a
human jawbone while bagging garbage
in Floyd Bennett Field earlier this year,
which the city’s Chief Medical Examiner
recently tied to a decomposing body recovered
from the Mill Basin park in 2016.
The members of a South Caroline-based
environmental group were picking up garbage
and fl otsam that had washed up over
by the Raptor Point area of the national
park in May when one member spotted
the mandible at the water’s edge during
low tide, according to the group’s chief dogooder.
“It was at the edge of the water, and it
was just sitting there,” said Rudy Socha,
chief executive offi cer of Wounded Nature.
“There was no dirt on it, no mud — nothing.”
Police collected the jaw bone and handed
the appendage off to the Medical Examiner’s
Offi ce, which ran DNA tests that concluded
earlier this week that the mandible
belonged to a woman, whose badly decomposing
body was discovered along the coast
of Jamaica Bay nearly three years ago, a
spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner’s
offi ce confi rmed.
The woman’s fi ngers were too rotten to
obtain usable fi ngerprints, but police attempted
to use her distinctive tattoos that
were still visible, including a panther with
claws on her lower abdomen, lips with a
hypodermic needle piercing them on the
back of her left shoulder, and a large, black
cross on her right ring fi gure, to identify
the body.
But investigators haven’t had any luck
and the identity of the putrefi ed corpse
remains a mystery to this day, according
to the National Missing and Unidentifi ed
Persons System , which described her as
between 22 and 33 years old and about 5
feet, 4 inches tall, weighing 95 pounds.
The good Samaritans at Wounded Nature
routinely clean seaside areas up and
down the East Coast, but Socha claims he’s
never found anything so grim.
“This is the fi rst body part we’ve found,”
Socha said.
If you have any information that can
lead to identifying this woman, please call
the NYPD Missing Persons Squad at 212-
694-7781.
— Additional reporting by Colin Mixson
Wounded Nature volunteers discovered a lower jawbone at Mill Basin’s Floyd Bennett Field in May
that’s been matched to a body that was found along the shores of Jamaica Bay three years ago.
Wounded Nature