TN TN - MCEWEN, human heart found in salt pile - adult male - 16 Dec 2022

[Teche]

Also in Kansas:

Salt mining | GeoKansas

geokansas.ku.edu

Iberia and St. Martin parishes (Louisiana) have salt mines.

 

[DrQ]

IMHO My head is spinning over this one. There are many possibilities and none of them pretty. Strange place to dump a heart for any reason. If organs being snatched this heart was maybe not healthy enough or didn't last long enough. Satanic? Still a weird place to leave it. Gruesome murder maybe. Still trying to wrap my head around the location. I hope there will be more updates on this case. I just got chills.

 

[deadfoot13]

We have a couple of salt mines here in Central NY (my grandmother was the first woman ever to go down into the Ithaca mine.) My husband drives truck and picks up loads from the mine on Seneca Lake, and I get the impression that they have decent security.

 

[Helechawagirl]

Well, I'm just saying. The timing is pretty suspicious -- around Christmastime? And it had been there long enough to completely desiccate. Is it possible that last Christmas someone was given this heart?

I see what you did there

 

[cutter99]

Facebook post this evening from Nick Beres, who is a very reliable news reporter in Nashville at NC5. While he doesn’t have any answers, he does have some facts.

 

[Lewie]

Wowee, I don’t think Occam has a razor for this one!

 

[LaborDayRN]

I'm also considering that this was a hoax/prank like @GRT suggested, or a threat (gang-related?) that was meant for a specific person who worked at the Department of Transportation. There's a ton of possibilities here but they all seem equally unlikely IMO

It sounds like something from a mob movie!
Has any heard it the coroner is going to be able to date the age of the heart? Meaning is it a modern heart or an ancient heart. ??

ETA: thank you @cutter99 for the above attachment. I now see that the heart may have been surgically removed so it makes sense that the heart is not an ancient relic. Sadly it seems as though it may have been taken from a hospital, lab or possibly a college / university. JMO

 

[5W's]

MOO: The heart had to have been introduced to the salt only after the salt had already been mined AND processed - otherwise, the heart would have been broken down into small bits during the process of the salt being ground up - if the heart was intact, it makes no sense that it would have come from the salt mine.

Salt is not retrieved from the road and the salt delivery system does not pick up rocks or other debris from the road - it isn't like a sweeper... it's a swirling scatter device that hangs more than a foot off the ground.

Medical waste does not get accidentally or lazily disposed of at a salt processing plant or in a salt transport truck or in a salt storage location. Taking a heart to any of those places is a purposeful action with an intention.

I know of no scavengers nor predators (besides humans) that bury meat in salt. Presuming this was an intact heart that was not attached to other organs or remnants of a torso, it also seems pretty improbable that someone died of an accident and ended up with animals scavenging off every part of them except for the heart... though this seems like the only non-nefarious possibility to me at the moment, that someone at some salt processing plant somewhere died and was then dismembered by animals leaving only some small pieces to be redistributed to other salt storage facilities...possible, I suppose, but extremely unlikely.

The only thing that sounds probable to me given what I know of animals and humans is that somewhere out there we have a human who was excited by the idea of preserving a piece of another human for their own morbid thrills, be that thrill ritualistic, a prank, or intimidation. Whether that heart came from a victim who was murdered or whether the remains were harvested from a cadaver who died of something less sinister, I can't really come up with many scenarios that don't culminate in a human being deliberately burying a human heart in salt. Hopefully they'll be able to utilize the DNA to match this to a family somewhere and get answers. Without that I cannot imagine this one being solved anytime soon, unless more human parts start showing up in salt piles.

My thoughts exactly I posted something similar in an earlier post on this thread about the condition of the heart being damaged if it was from a salt mine.

 

[5W's]

Facebook post this evening from Nick Beres, who is a very reliable news reporter in Nashville at NC5. While he doesn’t have any answers, he does have some facts.

It would be awful if it never gets solved of course there is that possibility.

 

[5W's]

It sounds like something from a mob movie!
Has any heard it the coroner is going to be able to date the age of the heart? Meaning is it a modern heart or an ancient heart. ??

ETA: thank you @cutter99 for the above attachment. I now see that the heart may have been surgically removed so it makes sense that the heart is not an ancient relic. Sadly it seems as though it may have been taken from a hospital, lab or possibly a college / university. JMO

The hospital/lab would have records of the missing organ so I think perhaps this can be ruled out. MOO.

 

[Bethan]

I wonder if there have been any thefts from a private medical collection or a medical museum ( for example, one attached to a University or Medical School)? I imagine there are many in the States.

I have visited such museums in London, as a medical student, such as the Royal London Medical Museum in London which houses the skeleton of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man.

Such museums display specimens of organs, healthy & diseased, historically used as teaching aids for medical students, surgeons etc.

I can see such items, if stolen, being sold on the black market, to persons having a macabre interest in such things.

The reason this comes to mind.I myself have a human skull on display in my bedroom, which was acquired legitimately & at considerable expense, from a private collection. There fortunately are strict laws in UK surrounding the buying of human bones.

(Incidentally my adult children objected to the skull, of which I am immensely proud, being in the living room cabinet along with the crystal wine glasses)

If such a specimen was stolen/ traded & fell into the wrong hands….if the jar was damaged/leaked or taken out of the preserving fluid, I could see it being buried in a handy salt pile perhaps as a temporary measure & then left there….possibly as a prank.

A bit far fetched, but if the heart has been surgically removed, as opposed to crudely ‘hacked out’ of a body ( apologies graphic wording) this is a scenario I would prefer ( to murder) & can envisage.

Whatever the explanation, an employee of the McEwen facility must be involved in some way,
or someone with access to the salt at some point in its journey there.

As others have said, it should be easy to determine if the heart has been previously preserved in formalin, before ending up in salt.

 

[LadyBelle]

This is the first case that I can honestly say that I'm not sure if I want to know the cause...lol

 

[FlossyMay]

There was a case where some dude stole a brain and used the formaldehyde it was in to get high. I think he sprayed it on marijuana. Maybe someone stole this heart for the same reason.

 

[Bethan]

There was a case where some dude stole a brain and used the formaldehyde it was in to get high. I think he sprayed it on marijuana. Maybe someone stole this heart for the same reason.

Interesting! ( Is that why as medical students, we all enjoyed our Mondays in the dissection room!?)

Joking aside, I still can’t see a reason for the heart ending up in the salt except as a prank or a grim warning.

If somebody wanted rid of it, it could have been buried or simply put in the trash. Putting in a salt pile seems a very deliberate act.

 

[LadyBelle]

I'm trying to figure out why some worker was even looking that closely at the salt piles. They show up when still dark load their trucks and head out to lay the salt. You don't inspect the pile first.
Perhaps was found during the day though?

 

[Puzzleworth]

Facebook post this evening from Nick Beres, who is a very reliable news reporter in Nashville at NC5. While he doesn’t have any answers, he does have some facts.

I was thinking the same thing as Mr. Leonardo: "A heart doesn't naturally leave the body during the decaying process, so clearly there is some human involvement here." The chest is like a safe (or...chest!) encased in bone, muscle, and connective tissue. Great for keeping the heart and lungs safe, terrible for the surgeons who have to crack it open to fix your heart valves. Speaking of which, even if an animal were to gain access to the chest cavity, the sheer amount of connective tissue that makes up the valves would make it hard to remove the heart intact. Most likely it would simply be torn apart and eaten.

A silly question but here we go. How is road salt chemically different from normal salt, and how does (if at all) the preservation of the heart in the road salt differ from normal salt.

Road salt is the same thing as table salt, just not edible. It has a lot of impurities in it. Dirt, stones, etc. Sometimes it's mixed with sand to improve traction for cars. This particular pile seems to have been just salt, though.

I'm trying to figure out why some worker was even looking that closely at the salt piles. They show up when still dark load their trucks and head out to lay the salt. You don't inspect the pile first.
Perhaps was found during the day though?

According to NBC (link here) the workers were making brine, so they were probably snow-shoveling salt into containers to be mixed with water when they spotted the heart.

 

[airportwoman]

A silly question but here we go. How is road salt chemically different from normal salt, and how does (if at all) the preservation of the heart in the road salt differ from normal salt.

Table salt is refined to be food grade; road salt usually isn't.

Some places in my area use non-food grade beet sugar as a deicer, even though it's more expensive, because it isn't as corrosive to roads and vehicles as salt.

 

[vls12345]

My thought from the beginning -- someone curing it for use in some type of religious type ritual. Far-fetched? Yeah. But that's what popped into my head from the start.... MOO.

 

[subaw0067]

IMO this is a medical specimen being used for a prank and theres nothing nefarious happening. (distasteful and probably criminal, but not homicide or grave robbing).

 

[airportwoman]

This happened in my area just a couple months ago (bone uncovered at landfill, later proven to be a medical replica) but apparently that's not the case here.

Resolved - IA - Clinton County, IA: Possible human remains found in landfill - Medical Replica

There are several missing-persons cases in the region, and if they are human, maybe we can find some solutions. They were uncovered by landfill employees this past weekend. https://www.kwqc.com/2022/10/10/suspected-human-remains-found-clinton-landfill/

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