Medical examiner says parts are not human
Gilroy – It started like any ordinary morning at the Pacific Pride fuel station, where supervisor Manuel Villegas was taking out the trash. Cloudy, but not storming; brisk, but not frigid. When he first saw it, sealed in a gallon-size Ziploc bag, he thought it was a post-Halloween prank: a slimy, yellowed hand.
Then he found the second bag, and the third. Two hands and a foot, each bagged like grisly leftovers, lay in the gray bin where Villegas had emptied his garbage can.
“I was hoping not to find a head,” he said.
At 8:38am, Villegas called Gilroy police. Yellow tape ringed the concrete lot at 8847 Monterey Road, where investigators combed the garbage for clues. Ponytailed officers in sterile white suits and black boots laid the bagged hands and foot on a tallow-colored tarp, waiting for a county coroner en route from San Jose.
“If it’s not human, we won’t worry about it,” said Detective Mitch Madruga. “If it is human, there’s a sick, sick person out there.”
The skinned hands and foot were adult-sized, with cut claws or fingertips – it was hard to tell which. When the coroner arrived around noon with a medical examiner, the two scrutinized the bags, lifting them, gesturing to police as they spoke.
“Not human,” Madruga reported with relief, as the coroner peeled off her latex gloves and police disbanded, ready to split a pizza.
The medical examiner, who declined to give his name, said he was unsure what kind of animal had lost its paws, or why, but that the bone structure was definitely not human. Madruga speculated that a home taxidermist might have dumped the parts to avoid defouling his or her own trash.
Video footage may reveal the identity of the mystery dumper. The tapes are stored at Pacific Pride’s main office in San Jose. The fueling station serves commercial truckers, 24 hours a day.
“I guess it’s Show and Tell Thursday,” Villegas said, shaking his head. “Surprise, surprise.”
