Twins' tragic end
B’klyn bros, 79, found ‘mummified’ at home
Two elderly twin brothers were found “mummified” in their cluttered Brooklyn apartment over the weekend, police sources and a neighbor said on Sunday.
The bodies of Elliot and Jerry Wolfire, 79, were found at the Louisa Street home in Kensington shortly after 3 p.m. Saturday, sources said.
The brothers may have been hoarders, with some rooms in the home piled with debris, including a barbecue grill, police sources said.
The pair had not been seen since Feb. 14.
Neighbor Joe Padilla, 67, said officers who saw the bodies told him they “were mummified.”
“The police said they were dead 12 days. One cop was new on the force. He couldn’t stomach to see it. He said, ‘My partner’s going up there because I can’t,’ ” he said.
Of the brothers, Padilla said: “One of them always came to the supermarket around the corner. And we started saying, ‘Nobody’s seen Elliot,’ because he’s the more mobile of the twins. Then my girlfriend pointed out that there was a lot of mail stacked up out front.
“I started knocking, knocking seven days ago,” Padilla said. “I thought maybe one of them got
COVID and had gone to the hospital. So we checked the hospitals, and they weren’t there.
“The lights were on upstairs and downstairs, but I wasn’t going to break and enter,” he said. “So yesterday the police came and broke through the side door and found them both upstairs.”
Elliot Wolfire was found facedown in an upstairs bedroom in the two-story home, while his brother was discovered face-up on the bathroom floor after cops had to call in the FDNY to get into the room, sources said.
Both brothers were pronounced dead at the scene.
Padilla said the twins weren’t hoarders but “just bachelors.”
“They washed their dishes. The bathroom was pretty clean,” he said. “But the rest of the house had thick dust. They needed a woman’s touch.”
Police said that there were no immediate signs of foul play and that it was believed the pair may have died of natural causes.
All doors and windows in the home were secured from the inside, and police found no signs of forced entry, sources said.
Police said they were continuing to investigate the deaths.
New York City’s most famous sibling hoarder deaths occurred in 1947, when Homer and Langley Collyer died in their Harlem brownstone after their collected junk collapsed on them.