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It turns out that Prospect Park is the perfect place to get your main ingredient for goats head soup.
Two days after the gutted carcass and the entrails of an unidentifiable decapitated animal turned up in the park, the head, covered in orange wax, was discovered roughly 100 feet away on Parkside Avenue on Thursday.
“I was walking my dog, sending texts on my Blackberry, and then I saw it,” said Alex Gurevich, who also first spotted the carcass on two days before. “I thought, ‘Man, is that the head?’ It’s gross.”
The head was lying on the sidewalk behind a tree opposite the parade grounds with two dishes were nearby. Both plates were covered in wax, and also had pieces of a green leaf and other food scraps on them — raising the probability that the wretched creature was part of a Santeria offering.
Along with the wax, the goat head also had an ornamental dressing on its forehead. The goat did not appear to have died in a great deal of pain, as it still wore a crooked smile despite missing its legs and vital organs.
Park spokesman Eugene Patron said that he would dispatch an employee to do the grim work of gathering the goat remains. Before the goat’s head was discovered, Patron was not too concerned about the appearance of the animal’s carcass in Brooklyn’s spiritual heart.
“It’s illegal dumping,” he said. “That’s pretty much it.”
Still, the case of the gory goat is eerily reminiscent of the harrowing saga of the Butcher of Prospect Park, which began last March, when some rocks along the park’s lakefront were found covered in blood.
A week later, chicken heads and animal guts appeared, then a dead dog, and a raccoon turned up by the lake.
Gurevich and others have suggested that the animals might be part of a Santeria ritual, but such practices tend to be accompanied by other items, such as grains, money and food.
It is unclear whether the gutted and decapitated goat is related to those previous incidents, which did not bear any obvious signs of ritualistic slaughter — except, of course, the slaughter.
©2010 Community Newspaper Group
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