Severed arm found in front yard of Hempstead home

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (WABC) -- Police on Long Island are investigating after a severed arm was found in the front yard of a Hempstead home.

The arm, which appears to be a woman's, was found in front of the home on Webb Avenue at around 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.

Noel Rivera told Eyewitness News he almost passed out when he made the revolting discovery Wednesday afternoon, an entire human arm that was severed at the shoulder.

It was delicately dropped just inside his brother-in-law Jose Diaz's picket fence.

"I think they just drop it in there. Very carefully drop it because it wasn't like far from the fence. They didn't even, didn't even throw it. Just reach from the fence, put it in there. That's it," Diaz said.

It didn't take long for police to swarm the neighborhood in the Nassau County Village of Hempstead.

Then, on Tuesday, more than 20 miles away in Bay Shore, two people made another scary find. They came across what police described as the dismembered body of a woman, steps from the Great South Bay.

Homicide detectives from neighboring Suffolk County took over the case. They brought in a cadaver dog to search for other human remains as Suffolk County crime lab specialists searched for clues.

The husband of 27-year-old Chinelle Browne, who was last seen in her Brownsville neighborhood Saturday, said police notified him because they believe the body parts found in Bay Shore Tuesday are Browne's.

"To know that my wife, mother of four, had to go trough something like that ...," he said. "I need to understand what was going on in her (life). I just don't know. I don't know, I don't understand."

Browne's four children are still in Guyana. She came to the states about a year ago and worked as a clerk at the Century 21 store, but somehow she ended up in this run-down apartment house where her husband said she was having a dispute with a landlady.

Neighbors said there is no "official" landlady and that squatters live here, including Chenille Browne.

Investigators would not officially say the two cases are related.

"To do something like this it was a premeditated act to cut up somebody like that and drop them here and there," Diaz said, "I want justice is done."

Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, a forensics expert, said the motivation behind dismembering a body is to hide information and prolong the discovery of what happened.

"It takes a very special kind of individual not only to kill somebody, but to dismember and that's not easy ..." he said.

Missing person posters up Thursday in Brownsville have been taken down as police continue to look for more evidence in the neighborhood.