New York City is an enigmatic place. Things happen there that simply could not be rationally explained to people who don’t live there. When you pack eight and a half million people into a single city, weird stuff is bound to happen. On Saturday afternoon, at about 1 p.m., authorities discovered a severed human leg with no hints as to its origin on the 4 line between 167th and 170th streets in the Bronx. Nobody knows whose leg it is or how it got misplaced on the track bed of the elevated section of train.
It isn’t all that uncommon for things to be lost on the subway tracks. The city’s Grand Central lost and found deals with hundreds of items daily. Coats, cell phones, bags full of cash, an urn full of cremains, that kind of thing, get left behind all the time. But a severed leg, as you might have guessed, is different. The Guardian laments that cops wouldn’t say “how much of the limb was found.” Though I suppose there has to be a point where it would be described as a “severed foot” if there wasn’t enough leg attached to it.
AMNY sources claim the leg was just left out in the open, “not wrapped or anything.” Police are still investigating the case of the no-longer-missing-leg, though wouldn’t share details about the leg.
In September of last year a different severed leg was found sticking out of a dumpster in Queens. There’s no indication as to whether the two cases are related.
For reasons that I won’t get into, my middle-school bully called me “leg” for several years. It was traumatizing for a young me, but not as traumatizing as losing your leg on the 4 train in the Bronx.