The body of a 29-year- old man was stuffed into the garbage chute of a Queens apartment building and crushed in a trash compactor before it was discovered by a janitor yesterday morning, police said.
The man, whom police would only describe as a 29-year-old Asian, arrived Sunday morning from Georgia, intending to visit friends at the apartment on 34th Avenue in Flushing, detectives said.
Police were not sure where in the building the victim was crammed into the 2-foot wide chute.
The 5-foot-wide compactor squeezes the trash into a long tube of plastic, which is then sectioned off into smaller garbage bags “like sausage,” Detective Louis Camacho said.
“The janitor noticed the bag was leaking fluid, which turned out to be blood.”
The medical examiner’s office has yet to determine the cause of death, police said.
As investigators tried to figure out how and why the man was murdered, neighbors in the otherwise quiet 12-story brick building said they feared for their safety.
“We don’t understand why someone would do this, and we’re very, very scared,” said Elvira Solera, 40, after crossing crime-scene tapes to exit the building where she’s lived for 11 years.
“It’s hard to feel safe here when you know that anything can happen,” said Martin Placios, 43. “I’m scared.”
Police said the dead man arrived at the building Sunday afternoon and appeared to be drunk.
Instead of visiting his friends on the eighth floor, he knocked on the door of a fourth-floor apartment. The tenant called the super, and the man left the building.
He was not seen again until his remains were spit out of the trash compactor.
When a man and a woman, believed to be the victim’s friends, pulled up to the apartment in a van yesterday afternoon, they were surrounded by police and taken in separate patrol cars to the 109th Precinct for questioning.
Some neighbors said they could not understand how the killers managed to get the victim into the garbage chute, which narrows before opening into the trash compactor.
“He’d have to be really skinny to fit in there,” said Chris Chung, 33. “I really don’t think that’s possible.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona
(p. 19 in metro)