PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — Detectives with the Portsmouth Police Department have discovered human remains in a marshy area in the Cradock section of the city.
Patrol officers were in the area around 4 p.m. Saturday night searching for a suspect in an unrelated robbery. During the search, they found what appeared to be human bones behind a home in the 20 block of Aylwin Road.
Officers say they held the area until the morning for investigators to return to on Sunday.
Neighbors say it was a quiet weekend; if you didn’t look outside, you wouldn’t know anything was going on. However, the discovery of bones in their backyards has people thinking twice.
“I really didn’t know what to think because there’s, they call it a marshland back there. Anybody can come from any direction and get back there,” said neighbor Cathy White, who lives just yards away from where police found the remains.
White says the cop cars starting arriving Saturday afternoon and didn’t leave until about 4 p.m. Sunday.
“It was just very crowded with all the police cars and forensic stuff going on,” White said. “They had the whole center of the road, it was totally, it was a parking lot.”
Edward Bittner, who lives nearby, said, “First I saw a police unit right up there, and I got down farther and farther and there was more and more police units.”
Members of the Portsmouth Police Department Forensics Unit, along with members of the state Medical Examiner’s Office, recovered the bones from the area.
Now, neighbors are thinking twice after the gruesome discovery in their backyards.
“We’ll lock up a little bit tighter for a little while, until we find out what that was all about,” White said.
The investigation into the discovery is ongoing.
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