Bust in body dumping
Cops say ex-con dragged dead woman into hall of building
An ex-con was arrested Wednesday for dragging a mystery woman’s corpse out of his Brooklyn apartment and dumping it in the troubled building’s hallway.
Reginald Newkirk, 51, is facing charges including concealment of a corpse and tampering with evidence in the wake of the grisly incident in the Park Manor apartment building on Rockaway Parkway near Rutland Road in East Flatbush.
Newkirk told cops the woman overdosed, a police source said. The corpse had no apparent trauma and the city medical examiner will conduct an autopsy to determine how she died.
Cops and medics were called the to the building about 7 a.m. on Tuesday on a report of a gas odor and found the woman’s body lying faceup in the second-floor hallway.
“I seen the body when the Fire Department knocked on my door and I was like, ‘Oh s–t!’ It was right there in the hallway near the staircase,” a second-floor resident who wished not to be named told the Daily News. “It was crazy seeing that.”
The dead woman, believed to be in her mid-30s. had no ID on her and remains a Jane Doe, cops said.
Cops arrested Newkirk in the first moments of Wednesday after they recovered surveillance video showing him dragging the body out of his apartment about two hours before it was discovered. He left the body by the stairwell and went back into his apartment, where he remained until cops arrived.
“There’s two cameras on this floor,” the neighbor said. “They had to have seen what happened!”
Newkirk’s arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court was pending Wednesday.
Newkirk did two stints behind bars, each for less than a year, after an assault conviction in June 2015 and a weapons possession conviction in August 2021, records show.
He was released most recently in April 2022 and was on parole until January 2023, state records show.
Another corpse was discovered in the building just last year on the first floor — one floor below this week’s gruesome discovery.
On Jan. 6, 2023, Jermaine Desaussure, known by his friends as “Light,” was dead for hours before he was found curled up on the floor of his apartment/
Desaussure had been shot five times in the chest. Whoever shot the father of two forced their way in and ransacked the apartment, friends told police.
No arrests have been made in Desaussure’s murder.
“I lived here over 40 years and I noticed for for the past four years now, you see more people coming in who has drug problems,” another tenant who asked that she not be named said. Wednesday.
“The building is a mess. You see garbage, needles, sometimes people shooting up on the staircase. They steal packages. It’s overbearing. It never used to be like this. It used to be kids playing in the hallways, now you don’t see that.”