Police have identified the man whose body they say was discovered dismembered in separate locations in the Bronx and Yonkers earlier this month, leaving his family struggling to understand who killed him in such a gruesome manner.
NYPD officials said the severed hands and leg they discovered in the kitchen of a Bronx apartment on Rogers Place and East 163rd Street on Aug. 5 belonged to Lutalo Henderson, a 46-year-old resident of the building who online records show lived in the fourth-floor unit.
The rest of his body was set ablaze in a shopping cart under the Oak Bridge in Yonkers, about 13 miles away, according to the NYPD. After those remains were found, the Yonkers Police Department said the victim had been killed elsewhere and whoever had disposed of them had used the location as a “dump site.”
Aziza Henderson, Lutalo’s sister, called the situation “very disturbing” in a Facebook post last Friday.
“I would not wish this on my worst enemy,” she wrote. “I pray they find the person who did this to him.”
Weeks earlier, she told Gothamist before police officially identified her brother that he had moved out of the Bronx apartment at the end of July, so she was skeptical that he was the victim.
“I really don’t know what’s happening, but I do know he wasn’t living in that apartment anymore,” Aziza Henderson said at the time.
According to the New York Daily News and other news outlets, NYPD detectives used surveillance footage to track two people rolling the shopping cart from Lutalo Henderson’s building to Yonkers — via a Metro-North train — around midnight on Aug. 5.
A spokesperson for the NYPD would not confirm those details on Monday but said the department had still not made any arrests or identified any suspects in the case.
Roberto Marenco, a resident of the building, told Gothamist after the body’s discovery that he vaguely knew Henderson but had no idea what could have happened in the apartment.
“He seemed like a calm guy,” Marenco said. “I hadn’t seen him in a while. I think he lived with a woman for a while, but then she stopped coming around.”
Police were serving a search warrant at the apartment on Aug. 5 when they said they found Henderson’s hands in a pot in the kitchen and part of his leg in the freezer. NYPD officials said they also discovered a gun and drug paraphernalia in a bedroom.
The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was still working on Monday to determine exactly how Henderson died, according to the NYPD.
His sister and family members said on social media that they were organizing a candlelight vigil and memorial service for him.
“My brother was a cool dude, and he did not deserve this,” Aziza Henderson wrote in her Facebook post. “No one deserves something like this to ever happen to any of their family members.”
This is a developing story and may be updated.