An exterminator called to investigate a foul odor at a Queens public school opened an ash dump, found a shoe, and then felt a human foot. What followed was a 911 call, a police response, and a grim discovery that has left an entire school community shaken: a rotting corpse wedged inside the chimney of P.S./I.S. 113 Anthony J. Pranzo in Glendale, Queens.
Officers responded to the scene around 9 a.m. Tuesday after the exterminator reported the find, ABC News reported. As of 2:45 p.m. that day, the NYPD had not identified the remains and had not determined a cause of death. The investigation remains active.
The building was closed for summer break and undergoing construction at the time of the discovery. The New York City Department of Education confirmed no students were inside. But that fact offers cold comfort. Students had apparently been smelling something foul for weeks before the school year ended, and nobody tracked down the source.
A smell that lingered for weeks
The New York Post reported that the remains belonged to a male and that the putrid odor had reportedly been present for several weeks before the exterminator was finally summoned. Students noticed it before the school year let out.
Ethan Xiao, a 12-year-old student at the school, described the experience:
"It was like smelling something funky. I was going to throw up or something."
A 12-year-old was smelling decomposition at school. For weeks. And the adults in charge of that building apparently chalked it up to something routine enough to ignore, until summer break arrived and an exterminator got called in for what was presumably a pest problem.
That timeline raises hard questions about the responsiveness of school administrators and city building managers. A foul smell strong enough to make children nauseous persisted for weeks in a building full of students, and the response was to wait until the kids left and then call an exterminator.
Parents want answers
Merissa Terranova, a 43-year-old parent, voiced a question that investigators will need to answer:
"If it was a construction worker, why wasn't a missing person's [alert], nobody was looking for anyone?"
It is a fair point. The school was undergoing construction. If the remains belong to someone connected to that work, why did no employer, no family member, no colleague raise an alarm? And if the deceased has no connection to the construction project, how did a body end up inside a school chimney in a residential neighborhood in Queens?
Police have not publicly named any suspects or persons of interest. They have not said how long the remains had been in the chimney. The Associated Press reported that city medical examiners are working to determine the cause of death, and that the circumstances of how the body ended up inside the chimney remain unknown.
Investigations involving unidentified human remains can take time. Across the country, police departments regularly face cases where bodies are recovered in unexpected locations, and identification can stretch from days to years. In one recent case, skeletal remains found in Cleveland were identified as a missing woman nearly seven years after her disappearance.
What the city has said, and what it hasn't
The Department of Education issued a statement calling the discovery "deeply upsetting and concerning" and said it was "making sure the right supports are in place for the entire school community while NYPD investigates."
That language is carefully bureaucratic. It does not address why a decomposing body went undetected in a school building for what appears to have been weeks. It does not explain what protocols exist for investigating persistent foul odors in city school buildings. And it does not say whether any internal review has been launched.
Fox News described the corpse as having been "stuffed" inside the chimney, a detail that suggests the body did not end up there by accident. The NYPD has not publicly characterized the death as a homicide, but the physical circumstances, a body wedged inside a chimney, make an accidental explanation difficult to imagine.
The discovery echoes other disturbing cases in which human remains have surfaced in locations where they went unnoticed for extended periods. In Florida, Vero Beach police identified a decomposed body that turned out to be connected to a double homicide. In Indiana, the body of a missing 24-year-old was recovered from a van submerged in a retention pond. Each case underscores the same uncomfortable reality: people can go missing and remain unfound in plain sight.
A school building, not a crime scene, until now
P.S./I.S. 113 Anthony J. Pranzo serves elementary and middle school students. It sits in Glendale, a working-class neighborhood in central Queens. Parents send their children there expecting a safe, functioning school. They do not expect their kids to spend the final weeks of the school year inhaling the odor of human decomposition.
The city owes those families more than a statement about "supports." It owes them a clear accounting of what happened, when the smell was first reported, what steps were taken, and why it took until summer break for anyone to investigate seriously.
New York City operates more than 1,800 school buildings. Many are aging. Many undergo construction and renovation during summer months. The city's Department of Education oversees a sprawling bureaucracy responsible for the physical safety of more than a million students. If a body can decompose inside a school chimney for weeks without triggering a meaningful response, that bureaucracy has a problem that no press statement can paper over.
Cases involving human remains found in unexpected locations often leave families and communities waiting months for answers. The families connected to P.S./I.S. 113 may face the same wait. In the meantime, they deserve transparency, not boilerplate.
What comes next
The NYPD investigation will need to answer several basic questions. Who is the deceased? How did the body get into the chimney? When did the person die? Is the death connected to the construction work at the school? Are there security cameras, access logs, or contractor records that can narrow the timeline?
The medical examiner's office has not publicly provided a timeline for identification or cause-of-death findings. The construction details, what type of work, which contractors, how long the building had been closed, remain publicly unaddressed.
For now, the facts are stark. A body was found inside a chimney at a public school. Children smelled it for weeks. And nobody in a position of authority connected the dots until an exterminator pried open an ash dump and found a shoe.
When the adults responsible for a building full of children can't identify the smell of death for weeks, the problem isn't just a crime scene. It's a system that has stopped paying attention.
