A chilling surveillance video captured the cold-blooded dumping of a man’s body in a black garbage bag on a residential Canarsie street, left outside a church in the dead of night before a homeless scrap-metal collector unwittingly wheeled the gruesome package down the block and made the horrifying discovery Friday morning.
Around 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 30, grainy nighttime footage shows two unidentified men in a light-colored sedan pulling up near the First Haitian Baptist Church. One steps out, opens the trunk, and hauls out a heavy black trash bag, the outline of a human form clearly visible as he drags it to the sidewalk and leans it against a light pole. A second man, believed to be the driver of what may have been an unlicensed taxi, stands nearby before both get back in the car and speed off into the darkness.
The bag sat undisturbed for hours on the quiet Brooklyn block. Then, shortly before 9 a.m., daytime security cameras recorded a man well-known in the neighborhood for collecting scrap metal, wearing a blue jacket and cap, struggling to load the massive sack onto a hand truck. He wheeled it roughly a block down Avenue L toward the corner of East 93rd Street, near a long-vacant former movie theater, where he opened it around 9:20 a.m. and found the body of an unidentified man inside, along with a bundle of wires and pieces of scrap metal.
The scavenger flagged down city Sanitation workers, who immediately called 911. Officers from the 69th Precinct rushed to the scene, where first responders pronounced the man dead. The victim, believed to be in his 50s or 60s, was bloated and already showing signs of decomposition, sources said. A white sheet was later draped over the remains as police cordoned off multiple blocks with yellow crime-scene tape.
“Yeah, that was horrible. And a lot of the seniors were crying,” resident Linda McKnight told reporters at the scene. “Because, you know, that could be my child or someone else’s child.” Another witness, Rachel, described the timing as especially eerie: “I just thought it was really eerie. It’s Halloween… it’s just shocking. It’s not every day you see a body on the ground bloated up and, you know, covered with a white sheet.”
No arrests have been made. Detectives from Patrol Borough Brooklyn South are leading the investigation and have canvassed the area for additional surveillance footage. The city medical examiner’s office will determine the official cause and manner of death. Police sources have not yet said whether the case is being treated as a homicide, though the deliberate dumping of the body has left the neighborhood shaken.
The horrific footage, which has circulated widely, shows the casual cruelty of the late-night drop and the unsuspecting scavenger’s fateful decision to treat the bag as just another piece of discarded trash, until he looked inside.
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