by Thomas Breen | Aug 5, 2019 11:18 am

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Posted to: Legal Writes, Edgewood

The city’s anti-blight agency found an unidentified dead body lying under a mattress in the rear yard of a boarded-up Winthrop Avenue house Monday morning.

Gary LaRoche, a property maintenance worker with the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), said he had gone out to the abandoned single-family house at 416 Winthrop Ave. (pictured) at around 9 a.m. to clean up trash and debris strewn about the derelict property.

The LCI neighborhood specialist for Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills, Maggie Fernandez, had given him the trash pick up assignment, he said.

As he worked his way around the exterior of the house, he said, he came across a dead body, covered by a mattress, lying in the rear yard.

“Not in my 22 years,” LaRoche (pictured) said when asked if he had ever found a dead body on the job during his career with LCI.

The property is owned by Brooklyn-based landlord Eugen Zledzopolsky, according to city land records. Zledzopolsky purchased the building from Citizen’s Bank for $50,000 in 2016. And on Jan. 23, 2018, the city’s Building Department sent the absentee landlord an unsafe structure notice, ordering him to secure a rear egress previously left open to trespass.

Lt. Elliot Rosa (pictured), who was on the scene with three other officers at around 10:30 a.m., said that he was still waiting on detectives arrive to start investigating the scene. He said he could not share any details about the body, such as apparent age, race, gender, or how long the body might have been there.

“Right now, we have a dead body,” he said. “Unidentified. That’s all I can tell you.”

Another deceased person’s body was discovered last Thursday behind John C. Daniels School.