Not a Halloween Prank: Neighbors Find Beheaded White Woman’s (66) Corpse in Three Pieces Spread Across Street; Her Son, 35, Killed and Dismembered Her on the Street, Before Jumping in Front of Train

 

Murder victim Patricia Ward 


Murderer-suicide Derek Ward
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

P.S. I thank the reader who provided the link to the above photos.
 

Police: Man beheaded his mother in Long Island, then jumped in front of a train
By Abby Ohlheiser
October 29, 2014 at 4:45 P.M.
Washington Post

Some people in a Long Island neighborhood thought a body and severed head lying on the sidewalk must have been a Halloween prank. It wasn’t.

On Tuesday evening, police responded to what New York media reports described as a gruesome murder-suicide: a decapitated woman in her 60s lay dead in front of an apartment building, with her head apparently across the street. Shortly after she was found, a commuter train struck and killed a man in his 30s.

Nassau County Police Detective Lieutenant John Azzata later identified the victim to the Associated Press as Patricia Ward, 66, a professor of language arts at Farmingdale State College.

In a statement to NBC New York, a spokesman for the college said Ward was “well-known, well-liked and well-respected.”

Nassau County Police officer Steve Zacchia told The Washington Post on Wednesday morning that Ward was the victim of an “apparent homicide.”

Ward’s body was found about 8 p.m. Tuesday in Farmingdale. Twenty-five minutes later, MTA police notified county police that an adult male was struck and killed by an eastbound Long Island Railroad Train. The tracks were about 1,000 feet from the site where the woman’s body and head were found.

Azzata told the AP that the male was Ward’s 35-year-old son, Derek Ward. Police said that the son had a decade-long psychiatric history, and that they believe Ward stabbed his mother inside her apartment, before dragging her to the street and beheading her.

Law enforcement officials told NBC New York that it appears that the man jumped in front of the train. An investigation is ongoing. The MTA is also investigating the incident, according to Zacchia.

Reports quoting witnesses described the scene Tuesday night. “The body’s feet were at the curb, the shoulders were at the middle of the street. The head was across the street,” Jack Imperial told the New York Daily News. “I’ve seen some gruesome stuff in my years of living … but nothing like this. I didn’t expect to see something like this, especially not out here.”

He added: “I thought it was a Halloween hoax. … It looked staged.”

WBCS 880 spoke to an unidentified neighbor, who said: “I literally thought it was prank. We saw the body on one side and saw the head on the other side. I thought everything was a prank.”

The New York Post spoke to witnesses who said that several neighbors assumed it was some sort of Halloween decoration, “only to lift the lifeless body and discover it was real.”

Abby Phillip contributed to this report.

[This post has been updated]

Abby Ohlheiser is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.