Body in Bag Found Off Palmetto Expressway

The action in Carl Hiaasen's Miami crime novel debut, Tourist Season, begins when a body is found floating down a river in a suitcase. That was very much fiction, but the idea of body parts being found stuffed into weird things in weird places remains very much a chilling reality in Miami. 

Today, Miami Gardens Police found two bags full of body parts hidden in the brush right off the embankment of the Palmetto Expressway. Update: Police now say that the discovery was just of a body, without further details. WSVN reports that the body may have been found in a black bag. It was found shoved in between bushes, and police had to cut through a chain link fence to retrieve it. 

The discovery happened late in the morning. The location was near NW 12th Avenue.
It led to the closure of an eastbound lane of the busy Palmetto. 

Police aren't confirming anything else at the moment. We'll update as more information becomes available. 

This certainly isn't the only time in recent years that bags full of body parts have been found scattered around the county. 

In June 2009, body parts enclosed in bags started washing up near the seawalls of Biscayne Bay. Legs and an arm were found first. Other parts were found in different locations in the bay over the following days. Police identified the victim as Omar Laparra, but the murder remains unsolved. 

In fall 2010, several different body parts started popping up in the waterways all throughout South Florida, including Miami and Broward. Legs and arms were found encased in cement in a canal. A head was found in a bucket. Other body parts were found behind a middle school. 

All turned out to belong to one man, 65-year-old Warren Danzig. Fifty-one-year-old Jamie Saffran was eventually arrested for the murder. Police claimed that Saffran stole Danzig's credit cards and used them to pay for his daughter's tuition and for new tires for his Jeep. 

In 2011, a bicyclist thought he discovered human body parts in the bay, but the remains later turned out to belong to a cow. 

Back in 1985, body parts starting washing up along the shores of North Miami-Dade. Parts of a woman's corpse in a bag first turned up. Her thigh washed up near Sunny Isles Beach later in the week. Meanwhile, fishermen found the torso of a man floating in a canal. That case went unsolved for decades, but as New Times chronicled, the case was eventually solved thanks to the use of recovered memories.