Eighteen-year-old Ronei Harris has become the second person charged in one of New York’s most gruesome homicides of the year: Lutalo Henderson, whose body was cut up in his Bronx apartment and then parts of it taken on a Metro-North train to Yonkers, where they were burned in a shopping cart.
Harris, arrested yesterday afternoon, is the girlfriend of co-defendant Muhammad Aadil (40), arrested last week and who lived in a rented room in Henderson’s apartment. It is still unclear why or how he was killed before being dismembered. The first remains were found in Yonkers in the early hours of August 5..
Days later the victim was identified as Henderson, 46. The cause of death has been listed as “homicidal violence,” a source told the Daily News. According to police, his apartment was a known place to buy and consume narcotics.
The teenager Harris was charged with murder, concealment of a corpse, weapons possession and drug possession with intent to sell, according to the Bronx district attorney’s office.
It was a brutal disregard for a human being.”
Harris and Aadil allegedly killed Henderson sometime between July 27 and Aug. 5 and dismembered his body, loaded it into a shopping cart and transported some remains on a Metro-North train to a location under the Oak St. Bridge in Yonkers, where the couple left it after setting it on fire, according to the indictment.
There, firefighters discovered the burning body with no feet, hands or teeth, around 2 a.m. on Aug. 5. After the victim was finally identified, it was determined that he had turned 46 on Aug. 4, but it is unclear if he was still alive at that time.
“The defendants cut off his legs below the knees, severed his hands and removed his jaw. They wrapped his torso in garbage bags and drove him in a shopping cart to Yonkers via the Metro-North train,” according to the prosecution. “This was a brutal disregard for a human being,” said Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark.
The gruesome trip from the Bronx to Yonkers was captured on multiple security cameras. By painstakingly piecing together the footage, police tracked the two defendants to the apartment Henderson and Aadil shared on Rogers Place near Dawson St. in the South Bronx.
When investigators entered the apartment, they found Henderson’s teeth, along with his hands in a slow cooker and a leg in the freezer.
The victim, a fiber optic technician, began renting a room to Aadil about six months ago after they met at an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) training and certification program, his sister Aziza Henderson told the outlet. Daily News.
Soon the young Harris began spending time at the apartment. “He didn’t want her there,” Aziza said of her brother. “He didn’t want Muhammad there. He wanted them gone. That was the conflict.”
“Right before this happened, he told me he was going back to rehab. Right before, maybe a couple weeks,” she told a former girlfriend and friend of Henderson without revealing her name. “He called me and told me he made the decision to go back to rehab because he couldn’t fight this. He couldn’t do it alone.”
“Whoever did this wanted to do everything possible to ensure that the victim was never identified,” he told NBC News Retired NYPD Chief Terry Monahan said before it was known who the murdered person was. “The reason someone would remove a person’s teeth, hands and feet is to prevent identification. Once you remove the hands, you can’t run fingerprints. If you remove the teeth, you can’t run dental records to see who the individual is.”
An investigation determined that although the body was burned in Yonkers (Westchester County), it was transported there, so the homicide investigation was handed over to the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Bronx District Attorney’s Office.
All charges are merely accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
In a similar case, in July a woman was found dead with her head shot inside an abandoned sleeping bag in Midtown East, Manhattan (NYC) and later her roommate was arrested as a suspect.
In April, suspect Nicholas McGee was extradited to New York. He confessed in a Virginia jail to having killed his roommate Kawsheen Gelzer and then cut up and stored the body in the refrigerator of an apartment in Brooklyn (NYC).