

HOBOKEN — The body of a man was found on a fence in front of an apartment building on Third Street near Jefferson Street shortly after 6 p.m. tonight.



Although initial reports said the man was impaled on a fence, an Emergency Services worker said the man was found with his face between two spikes of the fence.



"His neck was broken," said Geovany Sepulveda of the Hoboken Volunteer Ambulance Squad, the first to arrive on the scene.



Police coverged on the area and covered the man's body with a blue tarp, closing off the intersection of Jefferson and Third streets with police tape as scores of residents gathered on the corner and in the street in the early evening air.



Tania Narine, a Hoboken resident, told a reporter, "I was driving and I looked to my left and I saw a body slumped over a fence,'' pointing at a short wrought iron fence running along the front of a large multi-unit building, , on Third Street.



"He was on his knees and he was slumped over it and it looked like the fence went through his neck. My body froze," she said.



Several unmarked cars from the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office Homicide Squad arrived at 6:45 and a female homicide detective went under the tarp to examine the body about 7 p.m.



Numerous residents of the Third Street building were out on their balconies looking down at the scene.



No information was immediately available from police, although one police source at the scene termed the death "definitely suspicious.''

Hudson County Prosecutor's Office spokesman Gene Rubino could not immediately be reached for comment.



Sepulveda described the victim as a man about 35-year-old, whom EMT workers had encountered before. He said the man was homeless. When Sepulveda arrived, he said he saw the man's hat about 6 feet from his body. He said the victim had a scratch on his face.



"I thought there'd been an assault," he said.

An SUV from the state Regional Medical Examiner's Office in Newark arrived at the scene at 8:15 p.m.