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A second leg apparently belonging to an infant or newborn was discovered at a Bronx sewage treatment plant after another limb was found hours earlier, cops said Thursday.
The severed leg was spotted at 11 p.m. Wednesday at the Hunts Point Water Treatment Control Plant, operated by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, on Ryawa Avenue, authorities said.
A forensic anthropologist is working the case as a police probe where the body part may have come from, a police spokesman said Thursday.
The sewer plant covers objects flushed in a 10 zip-code section of the east Bronx, including Parkchester, Morris Park and Locust Point, cops said.
The city medical examiner’s office will officially determine where the body part came from, police said.
The discovery comes a day after another leg, apparently belonging to a newborn, was found at the same site at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday morning.
A city Department of Environmental Protection employee found the “possible human remains” — which appear to be a leg from the knee down — on a sewage conveyer belt, according to police sources.
The remains appear to belong to a newborn baby, the sources said. The incidents remained under investigation Thursday.
In a similar case, a 6-inch-long infant’s arm was found at a sewer plant in Winthrop, Mass. in 2006 and police initially said it was likely a flushed stillborn baby or late-term fetus, according to The Boston Globe.
Forensic testing later determined the remains belonged to a full-term infant, along with his race and gender, but not whether he was stillborn.
Experts at the time said the arm’s DNA profile could be matched with blood samples from newborns that are routinely collected by hospitals, according to the paper.
And Boston police said they’d take a genetic sample from the arm and run it through national databases of missing children.
But the case appears to remain unsolved.
In other cases, the NYPD has used DNA-based technology known as phenotyping to create predictive sketches of unidentified victims whose body parts were recovered in recent years.