NYPD: Missing high-rise worker might be in trash
NEW YORK — Police believe that a cleaning woman who vanished from a Manhattan high-rise may be dead, that her body was dumped in the trash and that she could turn up in a Pennsylvania landfill.
“We have reason to fear the worst,” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
A search of the high-security building has failed to turn up any witnesses or clear evidence of a crime. But police say they suspect foul play because Eridania Rodriguez left behind her purse and other personal belongings and had not contacted loved ones since her disappearance midway through her shift Tuesday evening.
Police were still searching basement floors of the skyscraper near the World Trade Center site on Friday. They also planned to return Saturday and do a third sweep of the entire building using search dogs.
New York Police Department detectives also had been dispatched to Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore, Pa. — the dump used by the building’s garbage collector — to look for a body.
Rodriguez, 46, was last seen around 7 p.m., when security cameras recorded her pushing a cleaning cart into an elevator. There was no footage of her leaving the building, police said.
Security in the building is typical for the financial district: Employees need identification cards to enter. Security cameras cover every entrance and many public areas. Every visitor is photographed before they are allowed up from the lobby.
The case has frayed nerves in the building.
“I actually find it a little scary,” office worker Jade Cajigas said Friday. Since the news broke, “everyone seems to be going to the bathroom in pairs,” she added.
Previous investigations of suspicious disappearances have led the NYPD to Pennsylvania, where the city ships tons of trash each year.
In 2005, police searching a Vintondale, Pa., garbage dump discovered the body of a mother whose 4-year-old daughter was abandoned on New York streets. The woman’s ex-boyfriend pleaded guilty in 2006 to manslaughter.
In 2007, NYPD detectives searched landfills in Pennsylvania for five days looking for the body of a 2-week-old boy smothered by his mother and dumped into a trash barrel on a city street corner. He was never found.
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