Police say the human head found inside a folding shopping cart in the Bronx belongs to a woman, not a man, and a man who knew the victim has been arrested and charged in connection with the grisly discovery, officials say.
Police originally said the remains found Wednesday night belonged to a young man, but on Friday morning said the head was identified as a 27-year-old woman. Her name hasn't been made public.
Darryl Orr, 57, of the Bronx, is charged with concealment of a human corpse, according to police. After executing a search warrant, he was additionally charged with criminal possession of controlled substance, criminal use of paraphernalia and criminal sale of a controlled substance.
Orr and the victim knew other from the neighborhood, police say, but their relationship wasn't known.
The woman's remains were discovered by two men collecting cans around 9 p.m. on East 182nd Street in University Heights. The victim's head was sticking out of a cardboard box inside a trash bag in the shopping cart, police said.
One of the men who found the remains told News 4 Thursday he at first thought it was a cantaloupe inside the trash bag.
"I knocked on it with my two fingers and I told him, it has to be a cantaloupe," said Manuel Vega, recalling his conversation with his friend Terry Frazier as the two went through the trash bags in the shopping cart.
"He right away said, 'That is a body. That's a body,'" Vega recalled Frazier telling him. "I said it's not a body, it's a bunch of meat they threw away, and vegetables."
Video shows how the cart got to that intersection of the Bronx: in one clip from Tuesday night, a man pushes the cart down Walton Avenue, leaves it by a pile of trash and walks away. A half-hour later, a woman, who's an apartment maintenance worker, struggles to move it and eventually pushes it onto East 182nd Street, where it ended up sitting by a tree for a day before the men stumbled upon it.
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Police said they were investigating the video and whether the people seen pushing the cart have any involvement in the death of the person in the cart. It wasn't clear if the video led to the arrest of Orr.
It's not clear if other body parts were in the shopping cart when the head was discovered.
Neighbors were unnerved.
"I'm shocked. I grew up in the Bronx, there has always been crime but not to this degree, which is horror film stuff," said Anthony Collado.
"Someone in a box, you have to be insane to do something like that," said Aicha Deng.
"It's scary, it's creepy," said Jessica Zorsa.
