Interview: Manorville man who found human skeleton in the woods near his home

A Manorville man looking for fallen deer antlers made a shocking discovery in the woods near his home Friday evening: the full skeletal remains of a human body.

“I was sheds hunting,” Matt Samuel, 30, said Saturday morning, after he was interviewed by investigators. “This is the time of year deer lose their antlers,” the North Street resident explained.

He was walking along a trail in a heavily wooded area with his dog Molly — a path he said he had taken hundreds of times before — when he came upon “something unusual sticking out of the ground.”

Upon closer inspection, Samuel said he determined it was a human skeleton. It appeared to have been wrapped at one time in some kind of cloth, he said.

“It’s been there for at least 20 years,” Samuel said. “There were trees growing up through it.”

Suffolk County Police Deputy Inspector Kevin Fallon, speaking at a noontime news conference near the scene Saturday, said the skeletal remains had been there “for quite some time,” judging by the decomposition of the body and the vegetation growing around it. Fallon said investigators could not yet estimate how long the body had been there.

The investigation is in its preliminary stages, Fallon said. The age and gender of the victim are not yet known, he said.

“It is long, slow, methodical work,” Fallon said.

A forensic anthropologist from the New York City medical examiner’s office has been called in on the case, according to the deputy inspector.

The remains, which were found on the grounds of the Upton Ecological Reserve, were removed from the scene Saturday morning by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner. Investigators are processing the scene and will evaluate whether an extended search of the surrounding area is necessary, Fallon said.

Police have not determined whether the remains are connected to any other cases, Fallon said. Four other bodies have been found in the past decade within a few miles of the latest discovery. Two of the victims are linked to the Gilgo Beach case, in which police are investigating the deaths of at least 10 people whose bodies or body parts were found in dense brush along Ocean Parkway in Babylon.

“This is kind of the area where people sort of get rid of their dirty laundry,” observed Samuel, standing in the road watching police at work in the woods on Saturday. “I’m sure there’s probably hundreds of dead bodies around the Pine Barrens no one’s ever found,” he said.

Captions:

Top- Matt Samuel of Manorville and his 14-year-old-German short-haired pointer discovered a human skeleton in the woods near his Manorville home Friday evening.

Bottom:Suffolk Police Deputy Inspector Kevin Fallon speaks to the media near the scene of the discovery Saturday; Samuel and his dog Molly walk along the road in the background.

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Peter Blasl.