Workers find skeleton in Kensington lot
City workers found the skeleton first. The lot they were cleaning on Kensington's East Cambria Street - where they stumbled across it Wednesday - was overgrown, choked with weeds and trash, studded with discarded hypodermic needles. The bones - "full skeletal remains," police called them - were lodged in the frozen ground.
City workers found the skeleton first.
The lot they were cleaning on Kensington's East Cambria Street - where they stumbled across it Wednesday - was overgrown, choked with weeds and trash, studded with discarded hypodermic needles. The bones - "full skeletal remains," police called them - were lodged in the frozen ground.
The 24th District officers showed up, then the news trucks, and then, once everyone had cleared out, the crime scene investigation unit. They dug the bones out with dirt-caked shovels, and were lifting them into a body bag by the time Louis Kulb crossed the street to talk to them.
"They said I should talk to you about my brother that was missing," he said.
Robert O'Brien, 33, was reported missing on May 29, 2015. Kulb and his three brothers and two sisters have been searching for him since. At first, they papered the neighborhood with fliers, and tried to follow the few leads they heard from neighbors and friends.
A few months in, they started calling morgues.
It was one of those calls that led Kulb, 27, to the lot on Cambria Street. The clothing the corpse in the lot was wearing sounded similar to what O'Brien was last seen in - a pair of khaki work pants and a work shirt. The father of three had been employed at a junkyard not far from the lot.
An investigator pulled Kulb aside and explained that the remains were so decomposed that the medical examiner would likely have to rely on DNA testing to identify them. Police on Wednesday would not confirm even the gender of the remains, or the cause of death.
"Is there any way we could see his teeth?" Kulb asked.
Police said it was unclear how long the bones had been in the lot, which abuts an abandoned building and appeared, at one point, to have been hidden behind a fence.
Staring at the lot and the white sheet that had covered the body found there, Kulb said he had felt a "gut instinct" when he heard about the remains.
"It's not a good feeling," he said. He didn't want to think that the remains could be his brother's, he said. "But I want closure."
O'Brien has two sons, 14 and 12, and a daughter, 5. The last time the family saw him, O'Brien said he was on his way to visit his daughter at her mother's house - but he never made it there, Kulb said.
"He vanished out of thin air," he said. His brother had struggled with substance abuse but was "working, trying his best to be a father," when he disappeared, he said.
In O'Brien's absence, both his mother and a cousin have died, Kulb said.
"We're really going through a lot," he said. "We're ready to get some closure, to mourn, and to try to move on."
@aubreyjwhelan