BASH ’N’ STASH
Dopes kill drug buddy, keep body in garage
Two Staten Island men beat a drug buddy to death with a baseball bat — and then stashed his rotting corpse in their garage for six months before burying it in nearby woods, police said Thursday.
Troy Williams and Steven Mazzelli are charged with killing 50-year-old ex-con Mandel Harvey in a drugrelated robbery in their home.
Williams and Mazzelli robbed Harvey of his crack — and, while he was sleeping, beat him to death with a bat in their basement apartment on Emily Lane in Greenridge, police sources said.
The pair left Harvey’s body on a couch for 48 hours while they smoked his crack, sources said.
Then Williams, 33, and Mazzelli, 27, stashed Harvey’s body in their garage. There the corpse rotted, until last month when Williams and Mazzelli moved it to Arden Heights Woods, an eight-acre state forest off Ilyssa Way and Arthur Kill Road, said police sources.
A neighbor, who gave her name as Jami, said she and her husband heard a long, bloodcurdling scream one night last summer.
“They fought all the time, but this night it was like, ‘Aaah! Aaah!’ Like someone screaming for their life,” she said.
Her husband woke up and told her, “That was bad. That person’s dead.”
But when Jami’s husband went outside, he saw nothing, she recalled.
She put a note on an Aspen Knolls community Facebook page asking if anyone else heard the screams — but thought the better of it, and deleted her post, she said. “We live too close,” she said.
About a week ago, Williams had all the windows of the house open — despite the freezing temperatures — while his dogs barked wildly, neighbors said. But none of them smelled any foul odors.
The case broke open earlier this week when Mazzelli walked into the 123rd Precinct stationhouse and told cops everything, a source said. Neighbors saw Mazzelli on Wednesday pointing out the Emily Lane house to police.
Acting on information Mazzelli gave them, police with a cadaver-sniffing dog Wednesday searched the Arden Heights Woods and found Harvey buried in a shallow grave, sources said.
Neighbors said the home where Harvey died and his body was stashed belongs to Williams’ girlfriend. They saw police take her away Wednesday. She has not yet been charged with a crime, sources said.
Williams regularly fought with his girlfriend but was otherwise kind to people on the block, said neighbor neighbor Sandy Beck. Once, in 2017, he offered to help her with a package when she injured her back. “He was that guy who was always respectful to me,” Beck said.
Harvey was arrested for murder in 2005, after he shot Dennis Canty, 44, in the head during a fight in the lobby of a building on Park Hill Ave. in Clifton.
He went to trial, but before the proceedings ended he copped weapons-possession plea. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Harvey was released in February 2018. “I’m back from jail,” he wrote in a May 19 social media post.
Both of Harvey’s alleged killers also have criminal records and have done stints in prison — Williams for attempted robbery, Mazzelli for burglary, records show.