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A human skull that was found by roofers last year in a dumpster behind the Wegmans at 4722 Onondaga Blvd., in Syracuse. Police investigated to find out where the skull came from.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- When a human skull was found in a dumpster behind a Wegmans store last year Syracuse police sprang into action, carefully investigating the mystery as they would any criminal case.

Police said little. Eventually Syracuse police indicated a crime had not been committed but revealed little else.

But whose skull was it and how had it ended up in a dumpster behind the West Side grocery store in the first place?

Some answers to these questions can be found in police documents obtained by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard through a Freedom of Information Law request. The detective who worked on the case declined through a spokesman to be interviewed.

Roofers working at the Wegmans at 4722 Onondaga Blvd. on June 18, 2015, noticed what appeared to be a skull in a bag in a nearby dumpster. They checked it out and then called 911.

Police officers and detectives responded. Evidence technicians arrived. Supervisors were notified. Officers photographed the scene and took videos. A member of the Onondaga County Medical Examiner's Office arrived and examined the skull before removing it.

The skull was eventually examined by a forensic anthropologist, Ann Bunch. She teaches at the State University College at Brockport and works as a consultant on skeletal remains for the medical examiner. The skull posed several challenges.

"Rule number one when you're digging at an archaeology site is you don't pick something up and move it," Bunch said in an interview with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.

"What we want to do is find things in context," she said.

In addition to the skull having been moved, Bunch didn't have a full skeleton. It's not unusual for people to find human remains on their property she said. It's important to contact authorities, Bunch said, so experts can figure out if the remains have any forensic significance or if they are merely archaeological remains.

Bunch found that the skull probably belonged to an older man due to the wear on the teeth. He was likely white. There were no signs of trauma and the skull had extensive soil staining indicating soil contact for a long time.

She also could tell the man likely died at least 100 years ago.

Police still needed to figure out how the skull had gotten into that dumpster. A detective began the process of collecting any useful video from surveillance cameras at the Wegmans, a nearby bank and several other businesses.

Officers picked through the dumpster where the skull was found and then sifted through five more dumpsters in the immediate area. They also searched the parking lot.

The Wegmans grocery store at 4722 Onondaga Blvd. in Syracuse. In 2015 roofers discovered a human skull in the dumpster behind the Wegmans.

Talking to Waste Management, which owned the dumpster, police found it had been emptied and returned to Wegmans on June 17, a day before the skull was discovered. That should've meant the skull was placed in the dumpster on June 17 or 18.

The dumpster with the skull was meant for construction debris, but inside officers found several cardboard boxes and pieces of paper. They found a partial checkbook with a name and several boxes with addresses.

Among the contents of the dumpster were a dry cleaning receipt, a receipt from LeMoyne College dated Dec. 16, 1993, a picture of gingivitis, and a VHS tape about calcium phosphate, a family of minerals common in bones and teeth.

Detectives began using the contents of the dumpster to track down people who might have known something about the skull. (The city blacked out names, addresses and other identifying information from the records they released to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, so it's not clear who officers contacted.)



Police talked to several people before eventually speaking with a woman living at one of the addresses found in the dumpster.

She told police that she and her husband were recently married. When she moved into her husband's house she'd wanted to clean and organize the basement. Her husband, a dentist, still had old patient files from his practice and memorabilia from his adult daughters, the woman told police.

So the woman got several friends, one of whom was a professional organizer, to help her clean the basement.

They began by sorting through boxes and having the woman's husband look through them. But after a week of work, they were throwing out boxes without completely looking through them. Patient files were shredded. They took several boxes of items to the Goodwill shop next door to the Onondaga Boulevard Wegmans.

Anything Goodwill did not want the woman threw in the dumpster behind the building, according to police reports.

The Goodwill on Onondaga Boulevard in Syracuse. The store is in the same plaza as Wegmans and was part of the reasons a human skull ended up in a dumpster behind the Wegmans last year.

The woman told police she didn't know the dumpster was for construction debris and thought it belonged to Goodwill.

But detectives remained stumped about the skull's origin. They eventually talked to the woman's 62-year-old husband. (City lawyers blacked out identifying information about the man other than his age.)

On Sept. 18, 2015, the dentist came downtown to the police department's Criminal Investigation Division and gave a written statement explaining the origin of the skull.

The man, who said he worked in periodontics, told police he was a sophomore in dental school in the Midwest when he worked at the free dental clinic run by the school. They cleaned patients' teeth. One day a man came in for a cleaning.

"He said he noticed we were studying on skulls and then handed me one," the man wrote in his statement to police.

But the dental student examined the skull and determined he could not use it for study purposes. He put it in his locker and took it with him to his apartment when he graduated. The skull went with him several times when he moved ending up in Central New York in his basement.

"I forgot I had the skull," he said.

Although it was clear how the skull ended up in a dumpster, detectives never did discover where the man who gave the dentist the skull had obtained the skull in the first place.

"At the time the patient gave me the skull I thought it was odd but I never questioned him as to where he obtained the skull from," the 62-year-old wrote.

Contact Ken Sturtz: 315-766-7833 | Email | Twitter | Facebook | Google+