They're Getting Closer

When bits and pieces of 19-year-old Rashawn Brazell began popping up a couple weeks ago-first in a subway tunnel near Bed-Stuy, then later at a recycling plant in Greenpoint that handles subway garbage, police suspected it was the work of a psychosexual killer Brazell met on the internet. Friends had hinted that instead of going to get his taxes done on the afternoon he disappeared (as he'd said), the youth was really on his way to a gay tryst. The problem with the internet theory became clear, however, when cops learned that Brazell's computer had been broken for weeks.

Then someone noticed that the body had been dismembered too neatly, with too much precision. Clearly, then, it was the work of a doctor or a butcher. Somebody with both a working knowledge of anatomy and access to some fancy cutting tools. Whispers that a new Jack the Ripper was stalking the streets and subways of Brooklyn began circulating.

Come Monday, the focus of the investigation had changed yet again.

Now police suspect they might be looking for a Transit Authority worker with access to some sort of sophisticated, high-tech cutting tools, and are currently looking to see if the MTA actually has any sophisticated high-tech cutting tools around. No one seems sure about that. It's also unclear what evidence-apart from where the pieces were found-led to the sudden leap from "doctor or butcher" to "MTA worker."

If you ask us, though, by moving the investigation underground in a search for answers, the NYPD is at least getting a little closer to the truth.

Ray Kelly should stop pussy-footing around, stop trying to break the news to us slowly. The fact that the investigation is moving further and further underground makes obvious what we've known from the start: Rashawn Brazell was the latest victim of the new C.H.U.D. offensive.

Granted, most C.H.U.D.s as we've known them in the past were sloppy, savage killers who ripped and tore at their victims. But it's been a while. Who's to say that the C.H.U.D. who killed Brazell wasn't a new kind of C.H.U.D.? Perhaps a more highly evolved, refined, even super-intelligent C.H.UD., when compared to the ones we're used to? And if that is the case, it's much more imperative that Commissioner Kelly come clean. After all, if there's one bloodthirsty super-intelligent C.H.U.D. down there, there could just as easily be thousands.

The lives of millions of New Yorkers may depend upon him telling the truth now, before it's too late.

-Jim Knipfel