After discovering a severed leg near New York Aquarium last week, police continue to find human remains in the water off Coney Island Beach.
The additional body parts were discovered amid rocks off W. Fifth Street at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 13, cops said.
A spokesman for the Police Department could not describe the discovery in detail, but eyewitness accounts suggest the entire corpse may remain unaccounted for.
“My friend asked [the cop], ‘Is that the body?’ and he said, ‘Well, sort of,’” recounted Marine Park resident Jill Martino, who said the patrolman claimed he was carrying only “a little bit” of the body.
Saturday’s grisly find follows last week’s recovery of a severed leg, which police scuba divers recovered on Thursday, July 11, along with a set of keys at roughly the same location, according to authorities
Officers closed off a section of Coney Island Beach while actively searching for the remains following an early July 6 sighting, but the area was reopened to the public in-between search efforts — before the leg was recovered, according to Martino.
“People were swimming everywhere they wanted,” said Martino, who frequents the beach daily.
Beach-goers were not thrilled to learn that severed human appendages were, and may still be floating in the water off Coney Island Beach.
“So insane,” said Sam Ali from Queens, who was lounging on the beach with his friend. “I don’t feel safe anymore.”
“I don’t think I’m going to swim anymore,” added Ali’s friend, Abdul Zaina.
But it will take more than a human corpse to scare Martino off the sand. A former Sea Gate resident, Martino is no stranger to the ocean’s disturbing deposits. In 2017, a live shark washed up on the shoreline, and two years before, a whale was found dead on the sand. Martino says that she has also seen a stingray, a turtle, pufferfish, and no small amount of garbage floating around.
“Everything washes up on the beach,” she said.
— Additional reporting by Elizabeth Winn
