‘Foul’ odor outside apartment leads cops to dead woman inside suitcase, NY police say

A man has been indicted after a missing woman was found dead in a suitcase, New York officials said.

On Sept. 2, Suffolk County officers responded to an apartment building after getting reports of a “foul odor outside,” according to a Sept. 18 news release by the Suffolk County District Attorney.

That’s when police found 31-year-old Seikeya Jones dead in a suitcase with her hands and feet bound by a cord, prosecutors said.

“I’m looking and I’m looking, and I can’t find her, and I come back from vacation, and I see on the news that my daughter is in a suitcase,” the victim’s mother, Yolanda Terrell, told WABC.

Jones was last seen Aug. 29 with a man later identified as fellow tenant Ronald Schroeder, officials said.

Officers tried finding Schroeder after Jones’ body was discovered, but they couldn’t until he “resurfaced in Manhattan,” officials said.

On Sept. 6, police found Schroeder at Penn Station after he went to the lost and found office to claim a backpack he’d left on the Long Island Rail Road train, the release said.

Schroeder is accused of having methamphetamine and “liquid ecstasy” in the backpack, officials said.

Officials didn’t specify what led to the crime or Jones’ cause of death, officials said.

He was arrested and charged with narcotic charges and the concealment of Jones’ body, prosecutors said.

On Sept. 18, Schroeder, 41, of Huntington Station, was indicted on concealment of a human corpse and three counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, the release said.

McClatchy News reached out to Schroeder’s lawyer for a comment on Sept. 20 and was awaiting a response.

Schroeder is scheduled to reappear in court on Oct. 16, officials said.

If convicted, he is facing up to nine years in prison, the release said.

Jones, a mother to a 4-year-old boy, was known as a “sweet, humble person,” according to her obituary.

“She would always say everyone was her friend,” the obituary says. “When we would ask who she was with or where she was staying, she would always say I am with a friend.”

Terrell told Newsday that “something good” will come from her daughter’s death.

“My daughter will not have been left in vain,” the mother said told the publication. “My daughter is going to get justice. She did not deserve to get thrown in a ditch in that suitcase. No one deserves that.”

Suffolk County is about an 80-mile drive northeast of New York city.

This story was originally published September 20, 2024 at 1:24 PM with the headline "‘Foul’ odor outside apartment leads cops to dead woman inside suitcase, NY police say."