Sir, Your Luggage Is Bleeding

Cops Probing Bag of Body Parts

from The Associated Press

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. - Four garbage bags containing human body parts were found over the weekend in a hilly park in Essex County, according to authorities who are investigating the grisly discovery.

"We have legs, arms, thighs," said county Sheriff Armando Fontoura. "No feet, torso, head or hands."

The remains, found by a police officer Sunday, were taken to the regional medical examiner's office in Newark for analysis. The age, ethnicity and gender of the victim or victims were not immediately clear.

Fontoura said the bags probably were tossed out of a vehicle as it drove into the South Mountain Reservation, which spans portions of Maplewood, Millburn, South Orange and West Orange.

Other bodies and body parts have been found in the reservation in the last 10 years.

In 2001, a man walking his dog found a suitcase containing the body of a badly decomposed woman. The body was that of Brenda Miller, a 34-year-old Brooklyn woman who worked in a New York shoe store, and who had been reported missing a week earlier.

In 1995, two dismembered bodies were found inside two suitcases. They were identified as 36-year-old Fakhat Askerov and his girlfriend, 28-year-old Larisa Jakovleva, both of New York. Parts of the couple's bodies also washed up near Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn.