Basement bod is dad
Ll son's hunch pays off after years-long dig
It was dear old Dad, after all! A Long Island man’s crusade to learn what happened to his longlost father came to an end Wednesday — when authorities confirmed that bones he dug up in his basement were those of his pop.
Mike Carroll and his two adult sons had awaited the news since finding the remains beneath the basement floor of their Lake Grove home the night before Halloween, although he suspected from the start that they had unearthed the bones of family patriarch George Carroll.
“It’s unusually not shocking,” Mike Carroll told The Post. “Of course, it’s emotional, but we can handle it.”
Carroll grew up wondering what had happened to his Korean War vet dad, who vanished without a trace in 1961, when Mike was 8 months old.
Mike purchased the Suffolk County home from his mom before her death in 1998, and spent years digging around for his dad’s remains.
“It was really entertainment for me at first, but it turned out to be interesting,” said Carroll, now 57.
As the years dragged on, Carroll excavated his basement inch by inch in his spare time, and turned to both the scientific and the paranormal, calling in radar-equipped search teams as well as psychics.
A break came when one of the seers purportedly got a hit in the basement, Carroll said.
Sure enough, his sons — who took up the dig after their dad suf- fered a stroke — struck pay dirt.
And the body’s location wasn’t the only thing the clairvoyant got right, Carroll revealed Wednesday.
“I was told by the psychic it was blunt-force trauma,” he said.
“She actually said to me that it was a pipe, that he got hit in the head by a pipe and he was buried alive.”
Investigators ruled last month that the skull of the then-unidentified body had, in fact, been cracked open by blunt-force trauma.
Now George’s death is being investigated as a homicide.
“There will be no justice,” Carroll said. “The justice happened when we dug him up because we just interrupted the perfect crime.”
Carroll has closely guarded his theories about exactly what befell his father.
“It had something to do with activity in my house. There was always wacky stuff going on, since I was a kid,” he said cryptically.
“It’s suspicious. You have to assume the people that were there knew something. But everybody is gone,” he continued. “I almost feel like it’s kind of destined. The last person [possibly involved] died four months ago.”
He and his three older siblings, a brother and two sisters, could never get a straight answer out of their mom, Dorothy, about what happened to their dad.
“I was always told, ‘Don’t ask,’ ” Carroll said. “So I stopped asking.”
The family is working to arrange a proper military burial of the remains at Long Island’s Calverton National Cemetery.