BROOKLYN — A person of interest was taken into custody after a dead woman was found wrapped in a bloody bed sheet on Union Street on Thursday morning, NYPD officials and witnesses said.
The woman, whose name and age weren't immediately released, was discovered about 1:46 a.m. outside 1635 Union St., near Troy Avenue with trauma on her body, police said.
She was pronounced dead at the scene, officials said.
Neighbors on the Crown Heights block say the woman was a quiet, middle-aged woman who "never bothered anybody," said Gaynor Williams, who saw her body near the trash bins outside her window early Thursday morning with bloody cuts on her neck and arm.
"She minded her business. Seemed like she was a hard worker. You’d just see her coming and going. She never bothered anybody," Williams said.
Longtime resident Kevin Labissiere said his 19-year-old daughter and a friend found the body as they came home from a nighttime work shift early Thursday. At first, they saw just the woman's feet sticking out of the sheet and immediately called the police when they realized what they had discovered, he said.
“They saw like a foot, a piece of a foot. So they poked it. They probably thought the person was passed out ... [or] might just be sleeping, or a homeless person. But then when they said the person didn’t move, they knew it was a body there," he said.
A 32-year-old man was taken into custody at the scene, but was not immediately charged, police said. He's being described as a person of interest, not a suspect, they added.
Labissiere said the incident is out of the ordinary for an otherwise quiet block where "everyone is nice."
"It’s sad, you know? No old lady needs to be dragged out from her apartment and put next to the garbage like that," he said.
The Medical Examiner's Office will determine her cause of death, police said.
