PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Family and friends gathered on Saturday to celebrate the life of 53-year-old Vincent Good, the man whose body was found stuffed inside a suitcase and trash bags in Kensington last month.
"He was a good person. He was a gentle man. He always liked laughing and joking and playing around,” his cousin, Eric Shubert, told our newsgathering partners at NBC10. "The way he went out was not the way he was supposed to go out. He had a family, a mother. He was a human being, and they treated him like he wasn’t a human being.”
His badly decomposed body was discovered on the morning of May 22, when a person was searching for scrap metal along Hilton Street, near E Street and Allegheny Avenue. Police said the individual found a human torso inside a suitcase. Officers who responded to the scene found more human remains in the early stages of decomposition inside two large trash bags nearby.
The medical examiner said Good died from numerous gunshot wounds.
A week later, authorities arrested Good’s girlfriend, Liza Ridley, accusing her of the murder. Police said Good was a partial amputee from an incident that occurred years before involving a trolley. Ridley was his caregiver, and they lived together at a home on the 5700 block of Leonard Street.
Ridley confessed to detectives that she shot Good in the head several times and dumped his body in Kensington.
She is charged with murder, possession of an instrument of crime, abuse of corpse, conspiracy to commit abuse of corpse, obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and other related offenses.
Three others, including Ridley's older sister and daughter, also face charges in the case.
“I pray it is not long and drawn out. I pray that my aunt receives justice soon so that we are able to get over it; it will never go away, she will never have her son again. But that peace that says we got them. They're going to pay for what they did,” said Erica Moore, one of Good's cousins.
