A serial kitty killer crushed the skulls of 25 cats before hanging their corpses like ornaments from a Yonkers tree, leaving horrified neighbors worried about their safety.
“I’m scared, because what if next it’s people?” asked Shatiqua Shubrick, 22, who lives next door to the vacant lot where the felines were stuffed in bags and tied to tree limbs.
“We need to find out who this killer is,” said a rattled Shubrick. “It’s disgusting, it’s disturbing, to do that to cats.”
Investigators were searching Friday for the cat slayer who left behind the sick trophies in what authorities fear might be some type of sadistic ritual. Some of the corpses were apparently hung in the last few days, while others were nothing more than skeletons, officials said.
A city sanitation worker said he made a similar discovery in the same lot at Overlook Terrace last summer.
“Not as many, maybe two or three, but hanging in bags like this,” said Brett Pisano of the city Department of Public Works.
“They were skeletons last year,” he continued. “I said to myself, ‘Why did they do it again?’”
Necropsies on three of the slain felines found on Thursday showed they were killed by blunt force trauma to the head and then placed in the plastic bags, said Shannon Laukhuf, executive director of the SPCA of Westchester. Officials believe all the cats died in the same violent fashion.
Cat bones were at the base of the tree trunk where dead kitties were found hung in Yonkers, N.Y., on Thursday.
“I’ve never confronted something like this,” said Ernest Lungaro, director of Humane Law Enforcement for the Westchester County SPCA. “The sheer number and the fact that they were hanging, it is disturbing.”
Officials said they had no suspects Friday, and found no evidence at the scene of any animal torture. Once they find a suspect, they’ll have a better idea if the cat killings were part of a ritual.
“We have some leads we are working on,” he said.
Sanitation worker Pisano and his supervisor Glenn Stefanik were doing a routine Thursday morning cleanup at the lot when they spotted one gutted cat’s body sticking out of a bag.
“It’s sick, really twisted to do something like this,” Stefanik said.
The SPCA and Yonkers police responded to the scene after the two workers spied the rest of the dangling bags at the trash-strewn spot on a dead-end street.
'That's just awful, you have to have a sick mind to do something like that,' says a woman who lives near the vacant lot in Yonkers, N.Y., where 25 dead cats were hung from a tree.
Other neighbors on the short block said stray cats began disappearing in January — and recalled last year’s grisly discovery of kitty corpses. They also noticed the local stray cat population diminishing in recent months.
“I used to see them all over, like more than a dozen . . . and all of a sudden now I only see one or two,” said a woman who lives near the scene.
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