Philadelphia

Firefighters Find Body with Severed Head, Cut Off Fingertips After Germantown Blaze

What to Know

  • Firefighters and police responded to the house fire on Price Street just before 9 p.m. Saturday.
  • When they put out the blaze, they found a body next to its origin in the basement with its head and fingers severed.
  • The Medical Examiner found trauma and stab wounds on the body. The victim's identity is not yet known.

Firefighters who extinguished a blaze at a house in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood over the weekend made a gruesome discovery: a person's body with its head severed and fingertips cut off in the basement.

Police on Monday said firefighters and officers responded to the house on the 200 block of East Price Street just before 9 p.m. Saturday. When firefighters doused the flames, they found the badly decomposed remains, police said.

Crime Scene investigators processed the scene and found that the victim had been wrapped in a green sheet and then in plastic, and that the body was in "advanced stages of decomposition," according to police.

A woman was found dead inside of a vacant home in Germantown Saturday night. Firefighters responded to the burning house on East Price Street and found the woman’s body in the basement after extinguishing the flames. The identity of the woman and the cause of the fire remain unknown.

Police said the victim's head had been removed and all of the fingertips had been cut off. The Medical Examiner, according to police, also found a stab wound to the victim's chest, along with head and neck trauma.

Police said that the nature of the trauma has not yet been determined because the body was decomposed. The victim's identity was not yet known on Monday.

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