SANTA CRUZ — New details have emerged around organs found mysteriously discarded on Ocean Street last week, though several questions remained unanswered.
Santa Cruz resident Ar’Mani McCoy told the Sentinel that on the morning of Dec. 15, she was returning home from a dentist appointment via a stop at Ferrell’s. Along the way, she spotted smeared blood below a heart, lying on the sidewalk. Nearby was a crushed paper cup and a plastic grocery store bag filled with blood and what turned out to have a liver inside.
McCoy said her first response was that what she was seeing must be some kind of fake — surely not a real heart.
“So I turned around and walked past it again,” McCoy wrote in an email. “There was a homeless man laying under the bus stop seat so I kind of freaked out so I called my boyfriend and he told me to stay and call 911.”
Soon after, Santa Cruz police sent an officer out to investigate. After providing some details, McCoy was told she could go home.
“I went home and 5 minutes later, he called to get my statement and told me that it was indeed a real heart and liver but they didn’t know if it was human or animal,” McCoy wrote.
The remains were sent to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office for assessment. Forensic pathologist Dr. Stephaney Fiore told police investigators that the organs had not come from a human.
Fiore, reached for comment this week on the remains, noted that finding only a heart and liver in a grocery bag on the street was “very odd.” She said the size of the remains was large enough to be of concern that they were human in origin.
“We tested the blood associated with the organs with a qualitative test that looks for human hemoglobin and it was negative,” Fiore wrote in an email. “Like a Covid or pregnancy test. A line develops if detected. So all we can say is that they were not human.”
Fiore said that the organs may have originated from a large dog or deer. The liver, she said, also had evidence of blunt trauma, suggesting possible roadkill.
According to Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Jon Bush, the subsequent police investigation was not able to determine the origin of the apparently animal remains.
Bush said his department had received a report that a witness saw an individual going through a nearby dumpster earlier in the day. Ultimately, however, Bush said he could not be sure if that was where the remains had come from.
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