NEW YORK – Earlier this week, NYPD officers responded to a tip that a body was being stashed in a Brooklyn apartment. Police discovered the dismembered body of a male that was stored in a freezer. The man was later identified as a drug dealer who was also a registered sex offender and had been missing for four months. He was killed and his body parts, including his severed head, were reportedly stored in the residence after a fight over narcotics.
The dismembered body was identified as 39-year-old Kawsheen Gelzer. He was a known drug dealer and registered sex offender who had a string of child molestation arrests on his rap sheet, law enforcement sources told the New York Post.
Gelzer had been on the state sex offender registry since he was convicted of molesting a 12-year-old boy in 2005. He was reportedly killed inside the fourth-floor apartment in September, chopped up and stored in plastic bags inside one tenant’s freezer.
On Monday at about 6:15 a.m. officers responded to the fourth-floor unit on Nostrand Avenue near Farragut Road in Flatbush as a result of a a CrimeStoppers tip regarding a possible body being “stored” there, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said on Tuesday.
“During the course of patrol’s investigation, they came across some body parts in the freezer,” Kenny told reporters. “At this point we’re trying to identify that person.”
Sources told the news outlet the refrigerator was taped shut in an effort to prevent the rancid odor of the remains from emanating throughout the apartment.
“We have a head. We have some limbs,” Kenny said to members of the press on Tuesday. “As of right now it seems like we have the whole body.”
Police contacted a woman at the apartment who was arrested on several open warrants charging petit larceny, sources confirmed. She was later identified as 45-year-old Heather Stines.
Stines “complained of illness” and was subsequently sent to Brookdale Hospital for psychiatric observation following the gruesome discovery, officials said.
As the investigation progressed, neighbors confirmed that Gelzer was the man whose severed head and dismembered body were found inside the apartment.
“Everybody in the building knew it,” tenant Dorothy Williams said Thursday. “Everybody knew he went in there and never came back out. We all talked about it.”
Gelzer has at least five other arrests on his rap sheet, including serving two years in state prison on a first-degree sexual abuse conviction prior to being released in 2012, according to records, the New York Post reported.
Stines reportedly told investigators that her jailed husband — identified as 45 year-old Nicholas McGee — killed Gelzer in September during a fight over drugs, chopped up his body and stored it inside the fridge, according to sources.
Heather Stines, right, and her husband, Nicholas McGee, have not yet been charged in the death of Kawsheen Gelzer. (@heatherstines9)
Stines and McGee, who is currently serving time in Chesapeake, Virginia on an identity fraud case, have not yet been charged in Gelzer’s death.
The cause and manner of death will be determined by the city Medical Examiner’s office.
