Skeletal remains of woman found in Brooklyn apartment; daughter lived with the corpse for more than a year

July 8,2014

By Reuven Blau, Erik Badia and Thomas Tracy

Police digging through 3 feet of garbage in a Brooklyn kitchen finally discovered the woman they were looking for.

But the rats and roaches had found her first.

“There was nothing to take out for burial, just bones,” said one neighbor at 15th Ave. in Borough Park, who requested anonymity. “Roaches, rats, mice … she was eaten up.

“They didn’t eat the walls — they had something better, unfortunately.”

: Behind the closed door of Apt. B5, Susie Rosenthal had been dead for more than law a year, and her mentally disturbed daughter had lived in squalor with her corpse,law enforcement sources said.

The daughter, identified by police sources as Chava Spira, 28, was taken into custody and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, officials said.

The grisly discovery was made at about 5 p.m. Monday after a leak in the dead woman’s apartment began dripping through the lobby ceiling.

The building superintendent went up to the apartment and found the door ajar. Billowing trash prevented him from opening the door all the way, but he was able to peer inside and called out upon seeing Spira sitting in the kitchen.

“She didn’t move,” the super said, “No response.”

He called building management, which called police, authorities said. It took cops nearly two hours to coax the young woman, who was threatening to hurt herself, out of the apartment.

When Spira’s aunt Janis Gellis came by to drop off food, she shocked authorities with the news that her 61-year-old sister — Rosenthal — should have been in the apartment, too.

“She asked who was taken into the hospital and said there should be one more woman living there,” said Mayer Berger, a spokesman for Chesed Shel Emes, a Jewish burial service for the poor.

Cops began searching through the piles of refuse and made the grim discovery of Rosenthal’s remains in the kitchen.

The body ” looks like well over a year decomposed,” a cop source told The News.

The corpse was brought to the city coroner’s office to try to determine when and how the she died. There is no indication of foul play at this point, a source said.

Disgusted building tenants said Spira and her mother were recluses.

“I never even saw the door opened,” said one neighbor.

But, every now and again, Spira could be heard “screaming away” across the courtyard, he said. “I don’t know what she was saying.”

Stacks of pizza boxes could be seen strewn across the apartment. The women’s only visitor was Rosenthal’s sister, but she would never go into the apartment, Berger said.

“She brought meals for them once a day and left it in front of the door and they’d take it in,” he said.

A foul odor had been coming from the apartment for a long time, Berger was told.

“That stench stayed for months and months,” he said. “To have someone live with that odor for months and months is beyond me.”

With Joe Kemp, Kerry Burke and Victoria Johnson