VICTORIA — Victoria police and the B.C. Coroners Service are investigating after a man uncovered a human skeleton Monday morning in the back of an abandoned five-tonne truck that had been sitting in the Roundhouse parking lot in Vic West for at least two years.
Roger Paltiel, a clearing company employee, made the gruesome discovery as he was trying to remove the old truck from the lot at the corner of Catherine Street and Kimta Road at about 10:30 a.m.
He said he found the doors to the back of the truck were chained up, with about 15-to-20-centimetre gap in between, so he snapped the chains with box cutters and entered the box to see what was inside.
There, about a metre inside and against the right wall, a skeleton was sitting on a box staring him in the face.
Paltiel said the truck was filled with junk and debris, much of it covered in rat feces and smelling of rat urine. It looked the rats had eaten away at the man’s flesh, he said.
“They’d enjoyed a good meal on him,” Paltiel said. “He was an older guy, no teeth no hair or anything, he looked like a perfect skeleton.” He said a suede jacket was draped over the bones.
“So either the guy got stuck in there or it was chained up while he was in there,” said Paltiel, who was hired to move the truck by Roundhouse Properties Ltd., the company developing on the site next to the Bayview condominiums. “The question will be who put the chain up and whether they checked out the contents before putting the chain on.”
Victoria police spokesman Sgt. Grant Hamilton said the registered owner of the vehicle, who he would not name, was reported missing by family in January, but had not been seen for months before that. Police last contacted the missing man in 2007, but Hamilton would not say why.
Hamilton said while the death is suspicious it’s too early to tell whether the skeleton is the missing man. The cause of death is not yet known, he said.
Aerial photos from the Capital Regional District taken in 2007 show the truck in the parking lot, while the registration sticker on its licence plate says it expired in 2001.
Monday morning, police cordoned off the Roundhouse property across from Spinnakers Pub including part of Catherine Street for about two hours.
At about 1 p.m., coroner Barb McLintock watched as forensic identifiers in white suits, masks and blue gloves opened the truck’s doors and slowly removed and searched the contents of the truck in an attempt to identify the human remains. They pulled out ladders, rusty chairs, a duffel bag full of shoes and dirty clothes and a small blue suitcase containing a pink sheet, a Canadian flag and a yellow plastic bag. There was also a weathered box containing an artificial Christmas tree or garland.
Police brought in a B.C. Transit bus — in addition to their police van — to block the view of the truck from both sides from Catherine Street and from the railroad tracks to the north as they removed the objects.
“There was a whole bunch of crap in there,” said Paltiel. “He looked like the guy was living in there, there was a car and boxes and contents and clothing.”
A homeless man who would only identify himself as Luke said a lot of street people take shelter under and in the vehicles and discarded objects in the Roundhouse yard.
Around 3:15 p.m., investigators pulled out the skeleton in a body bag. “Our team did a very good job of getting that out intact, which we were a little worried about,” said McLintock.
McLintock said they couldn’t determine the age or sex of the person or how long they’ve been dead.
“You can’t tell with those kind of remains,” she said. “Basically there was a person in there who had clearly been dead for a period of time this was not a recent death and that’s the kind that really takes a lot of work in terms of doing the investigative work and the forensic work.”
The remains were moved to Royal Jubilee Hospital and will be sent to Vancouver where they will try to identify the person from dental records or by DNA, said Hamilton.
McLintock hopes to start the forensic testing this week.
The cab of the truck is an older-model Ford, likely a Ford Louisville 700, built in the 1970s. The cab is painted red, and the box is white, with the word “McLean’s” painted in black across the front.
The words “Victoria, B.C.” and the phone number 604-381-4540 can be seen beneath the white paint and graffiti on the side of the box. The phone number traced to a T-shirt shop in Tillicum mall that closed in 1994.
Shorly after 4 p.m., a tow truck hauled the truck out of the parking lot. By the evening, it was sitting in a parking lot, roped off with police tape, behind the fire station on Bay Street.
The Roundhouse property is owned by developer Ken Mariash, who purchased it in 2003 and expects to move forward with a $250-million development, which includes refurbishing the railway roundhouse and building a hotel and condominium, in the next 10 years. Mariash is also developing the adjacent Bayview condo project, where one tower is completed, and two more are planned.
Victoria police say they may release more details Tuesday morning.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
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