Nothing to See Here

Downtown remodel leads to bones, shoes and rumors

The investigation, to the extent that there ever was one, is over. The concrete in a 3-foot deep post hole is testament to that.

Behind the new headquarters of the International Folk Art Alliance at 620 Cerrillos Road, a construction worker digging three post holes came across a few bone fragments last night.

"We find this kind of thing all the time," explains Nat Sena, a crew supervisor with Wolf Corp., which is handling the remodel of the old American Country Collection store for the folk art group.

No one thought much of it, he explains, and workers went home for the night. But the mystery deepened on Thursday morning.

"When we found the shoes and some teeth, we kind of thought it might be something," construction worker Jesus Trejo tells SFR. The shoes were smaller and looked like those of a child, so they told Sena and the supervisor called police.

"It could have been a fang from a dog," Sena says, "but I've seen molars when they take them out and it kind of looks like an upside down fang."

"I've been in this business 30 years," Sena says. "I was working across from Shokho [Café] … and we were pulling out entire bodies and sent them with the archaeologists. We used to have a priest, a rabbi, an Indian chief, a medicine man and everybody blessing it, because they didn't know."

Police arrived at around 8 am Thursday and were gone before noon, according to crews on site.

SFR asked police department spokesman and public records custodian Greg Gurule about what police found when they looked closer. He says the bones belonged to an animal.

"Who buries animal bones in a shoe?" Gurule replies via email. SFR told him we had the same question and also wondered how the crime scene team determined they were animal bones.

"They are very well-trained in identifying remains of both humans and animals," he says. "They have made the determination the remains are not human. There is no investigation."

Thursday afternoon, crews were back at work, with the holes and their short-lived mystery just about filled in.

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