NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) – A 70-year-old woman was found dead in a garbage bag at a luxury apartment building in the South Bronx on Thursday, police said Friday as they questioned four people who are in custody in the case, and as the search continues for two squatters in a similar case out of Manhattan.
The grisly discovery was made around 1:45 p.m. by NYPD officers responding to a 911 call from 322 Grand Concourse, a luxury building in Mott Haven that opened last year.
The yet-identified woman was found unresponsive in a garbage bag, police said. EMS pronounced her dead at the scene.
The medical examiner is working to determine her cause of death.
Four people—two men and two women described by police as persons of interest—were taken into custody for questioning.
Charges against them were pending on Friday as the investigation continued, police said.
While the four people in the Bronx case haven't been said to be squatters, the news comes as police investigate a similar case in which a mother was found dead in a bag at her upscale Manhattan apartment, allegedly by squatters who fled the city and remain at large.
Nadia Vitel, 52, was discovered brutally murdered—and stuffed in a duffel bag—last Thursday at her upscale apartment on East 31st Street in Kips Bay.
The apartment had been vacant for several months after the death of Vitel's mother, and police believe Vitel returned to the home to discover two squatters living there.
"Squatters took the apartment over, and this woman came home to get this apartment set up and walked in on the squatters that were there," NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Thursday.
The two squatters beat Vitel to death, put her body in the duffel bag and stuck the bag in a front closet before they stole her Lexus and fled the city, according to police.
Concerned family members contacted cops when they hadn't heard from Vitel, leading to the discovery of her body. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide by blunt force trauma to the head.
Her stolen Lexus was later involved in a crash near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but the suspects were nowhere to be found.
A bill was filed just this week in Albany to toughen squatter laws in New York City, where squatters may receive tenancy rights after 30 days, requiring landlords to go through the courts to evict them—a process that can take years. By comparison, in the rest of New York state, squatters have to be in a home 10 years before they can claim a legal right to remain on the property.
State Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz, a Long Island Republican, recently filed a bill that would clarify the definition of "tenant" to exclude squatters. Instead squatters would be considered trespassers.
"This bill will make it so that you can call the police," Blumencranz told WCBS 880's Drive Time with Michael Wallace on Thursday. "If someone breaks into your home and stays there for 30 days, they are not afforded tenancy rights."