By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
LOWER EAST SIDE — It was a scene straight out of "CSI."
Mysterious bones were found in a box in the garbage last Wednesday in front of a public housing complex by a city sanitation worker.
NYPD crime tape cordoned off the scene at Columbia and Houston streets. A crowd gathered.
And residents had their theories.
“Those bones must have been there for a long time,” said Baruch Houses resident Edwin Mercado, 26, noting they appeared picked clean. “Some of the bones were broken.”
Bel Gonzalez Jordan, 30, was convinced the bones were human. Having studied human anatomy in college, she thought she had the edge in solving the mystery.
“I definitely saw the ilium [pelvic bone] — there was two of them, and it was split,” said the licensed veterinary technician. “The hip was broken in half.”
Mercado, however, wasn't so sure. A close look before NYPD investigators bagged each bone individually and took them away lead him to have reservations.
“I thought somebody killed a dog,” Mercado said.
As news of the bones swirled through the Lower East Side, rumors became conflated with other rumors.
Gonzalez Jordan explained that another resident of the complex told her that a different set of bones was found in a dumpster closer to Delancey Street a couple of months back.
“I remember them saying that it was a ribcage,” she said.
On Friday, the city Medical Examiner's office ruled the bones were not human.
As of publication, it remained a mystery as to what they were.
