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Horrific Scene Awaited Police Officers in Philadelphia Home

PHILADELPHIA – Officer George Bengal, director of law enforcement at the Pennsylvania SPCA, came out of a Feltonville house yesterday carrying box after box of dead animal parts and skins.

After hours of digging through the dirt in an enclosed back area of the house and searching through the clutter of the house, PSPCA investigators found the remains of about 400 to 500 animals strewn throughout the house or buried in the ground in the back enclosed area, Bengal later said.

The remains included “possibly” the carcasses of two monkeys, he said. The bones of one were found on an altar in a room off the kitchen.

PSPCA law-enforcement officers also found about 100 or more knives, mostly machetes, he said.

Animals “definitely” were used in some kind of religious ritual, Bengal said yesterday evening, after the officers finished digging and collecting boxes of evidence.

Authorities are now trying to find the people who lived in the rented house on Front Street near Rockland.

Bengal said that the man who rented the house is believed to have been out of the country for months, possibly in Mexico, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Investigators are also trying to track down the man’s live-in partner and another woman who lived in the house, Bengal said.

All three are considered suspects and could face summary offenses, or possibly misdemeanor charges of animal cruelty, he said.

Earlier in the day, Bengal came out of the house with a cardboard box filled with turtle shells and the skulls and antlers of white-tailed deer, placing the box in the back of his pickup truck.

He went back in and returned with a blue plastic bin, filled with more turtle shells. There was also a dead cobra, coiled with its head held high.

On another trip, he brought out a box with a leopard skin and a deer skin.

“We have uncovered some wildlife remains inside of the property,” Bengal told reporters outside the house. “We’re still digging.”

He said he believed that some of the remains were those of beavers, deer and groundhogs, but said that the carcasses were so badly decomposed that he would not be certain of their species until the remains were examined by a forensic veterinarian. But he later confirmed that the skulls and antlers belonged to white-tailed deer and that the snake was a cobra.

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