Kendall Square skyline from across the Charles River. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

A man is being held on $1 million bail for charges related to a gruesome discovery in Kendall Square early Saturday morning, where Cambridge police found a limbless, headless human torso in a duffel bag that had purportedly been dropped and left on a street near a biotech facility, just a few hours before authorities arrived.

Carlos Colina pleaded not guilty to counts of assault and battery causing serious bodily injury and improper disposal of human remains at his Monday arraignment. According to multiple reports, Colina is the lone suspect Cambridge police and the Middlesex County District Attorney have identified in an ongoing homicide investigation.

 

A Cambridge police report released during Monday’s arraignment states that officers found multiple blood-stained bags, each containing a severed human limb, in the common area on the third floor of Colina’s Sixth Street apartment building, across the street from Biogen, Saturday morning. Police arrested Colina, a third-floor resident, after he stepped out of his unit, unprovoked, reeking of bleach.

Inside Colina’s apartment, police found a handleless, reddish-brown stained handsaw, and cleaning supplies; there were tool-mark scratches in the unit’s bathtub and bits of fabric had been carved out and removed from the carpet; stains, similar to those found on plastic bags in the common area were noticeable on the floor where the carpet had been stripped away, according to the police report.

After the discovery of the initial duffel bag on Binney Street, detectives watched surveillance video that, according to police, showed Colina first exit his apartment building shortly before 8 p.m. Friday night, accompanied by a man, later identified as Jonathan Camilien, whose torso had been left placed inside the duffel bag.

The Sixth Street apartment building’s management identified Colina as a third-floor resident of the building after watching the surveillance footage, while police were conducting their search of the property. Colina, police said, made several trips in and out of the building between Friday night and Saturday morning.

Camilien was seen with Colina on two of those trips. Boston.com reports:

The pair returned at 8:40 p.m., with plastic grocery bags, according to police. Colina’s neighbor happened to be leaving the building around the same time when he saw the pair get off the elevator on the third floor, where Colina lived. At 9:15 p.m., a neighbor heard yelling coming from Colina’s apartment, police said.
Video surveillance captured the pair again an hour later, when they left the building at 10:15 p.m. They returned after an hour. Colina was carrying a bag, and Camilien, who police would later describe as a “thin male believed to be the victim,” was on his phone. This is the last time Camilien would be seen on video surveillance, police said.

The next time Biogen’s cameras capture Colina exiting the building, he’s carrying a duffel bag; he walks across the street, pausing at the median strip, and drops the bag by a fence at 4:18 a.m. Then he returns to his apartment building – alone.

He exited and re-entered through a side door 30 minutes later – alone.

According to reports, police were swarming the area by 9 a.m. Saturday morning. At 6:30 p.m. Saturday night Middlesex D.A. Marian Ryan held a press conference at Cambridge police headquarters. A homicide investigation was underway and a suspect was in custody, she said.

 

An initial Boston Globe report published Saturday, April 4 states the duffel bag was found at 7:54 a.m. According to a Boston.com story published Monday, April 6, a security worker first reported the bag as suspicious to her supervisor at 5:30 a.m.; An officer with a bomb-sniffing dog arrived to investigate at about 8:20 a.m.

When examined side-by-side, the timeline offered by the Globe’s Saturday report and Boston.com’s Monday report suggests that the suspicious-seeming duffel bag, discovered and first reported to a Biogen security supervisor at 5:30 a.m., sat in the open for roughly 2 hours and 50 minutes, before a Cambridge police officer responded to investigate the matter.

However, as noted in Boston.com’s story on Monday, the police report states that the Biogen security supervisor who was first notified of the bag’s presence didn’t tell anyone about it until the end of his shift. It wasn’t until the next supervisor on call decided to call Biogen’s Global Command Center – which proceeded to call the Cambridge PD – that the suspicious duffel bag, sitting idol between a police department and a biotech facility, was addressed by a law enforcement.

At 8 a.m. Saturday morning, Cambridge police tweeted:

 

It’s also worth noting just how close the Cambridge police office is to the location the bag was found. According to Google Maps, 250 Binney St. is just 390 feet from the Cambridge Police Department.

Update: Cambridge PD communications director Jeremy Warnick tells BostInno, “an officer responded [to the duffel bag’s location] within two minutes of the initial report of the suspicious package.”

A police officer, accompanied by a bomb-sniffing dog, arrived at the scene at 8:20 a.m, Warnick confirmed in a Tuesday afternoon phone call.

Police have made similar, grisly discoveries of human remains over the course of the last year or so.

In March 2014, the Middlesex D.A.’s office confirmed human remains were found near Somerville High School. The Somerville Times reported at the time:

The remains are those believed to be of a Somerville man who was brutally murdered and who’s body was dismembered and parts places in suitcases and garbage bags then later disposed of behind a Norwood school last month.

In December 2014, officials told WCVB two sets of human remains were discovered in a wooded area along Brockton’s North Quincy Street. At least one of the bodies, a young woman, was dismembered, Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz said.

Because of the ongoing nature of the investigation into the circumstances that led to Saturday’s discovery in Kendall Square, Warnick says, Cambridge police can’t comment on whether these cases are related.

“The suspect [Colina] and the victim [Camilien] were known to each other,” Warnick tells us, citing information released in the Middlesex D.A.’s report of the incident. “So we were confident this wasn’t a random act.”

Editor’s note: This story was edited after publication to remove speculation and instead focus on factual statements by police. 

 

One man is dead. One man is in custody. What happens next?
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