A few minutes after 6 a.m. Wednesday, the driver of a black sport utility vehicle called 911 from his cellphone to report that he had just hit someone on 108th Street in Corona, Queens.

He went back to the spot. But there was no body there.

At 7:05 a.m. in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the driver of a red van noticed a pedestrian trying to flag him down, yelling that he was dragging something. He pulled over and made a gruesome find: The body of a man  hooked through his sternum  was affixed to a steel plate that was part of the van’s undercarriage.

The man had apparently been hit by the first car and then dragged by the second one through major arteries of Queens and Brooklyn: the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Belt Parkway and Ocean Parkway.

It was 19.8 miles in all  and more than 50 minutes  before the van dragging the torn-up corpse finally came to a stop at Coney Island Avenue and Brighton 10th Street.