Creepy Story About A Murder on Carroll Street

Last year, we did a post asking whether a landlord needed to disclose a death in an apartment to potential renters.  In this excerpt from a longread on The Airship, local writer, Freddie Moore, tells the story of the tenant who was murdered in the garden apartment of her family's home on Carroll Street in Gowanus:

It’s Tuesday, March 25, 2008. It’s 4 in the afternoon. You can see the news vans and police cars down the street. You already know what happened; you were told over the phone. Your friend who lives up the block comes with you. The neighbors stand outside their houses, all the old Italian ladies in their usual flowered cleaning dresses. All your friend can say is “Holy shit.” He leaves you with “See you tomorrow at school.”

The homicide detectives are drinking coffee just outside the yellow tape perimeter. You say, “I live here.” They make you show ID. Your last name matches your father’s. They look at your face and let you through.

The detectives give you some time with your dad. The whole house smells chemical, but you can’t place what it is exactly. Your dad tells you it all went like this: It was around 11 A.M. He was getting ready for work and something didn’t smell right. He thought maybe there was a gas leak and tried calling down to the basement apartment for the tenant: “Michael?” He called the name a few times. When he went downstairs, there was ammonia cleaner and blood everywhere, blood all around Michael. Your dad ran upstairs, called 911. They made him go back down to try to resuscitate Michael. Your dad says he thought that maybe he had killed himself.

The detectives — there are three of them — ask you to detail what you remember from the night before to the morning you left the house. All of them take notes. You say you remember watching TV. You remember hearing yelling from the basement and exchanging glances with your father, thinking the argument was too loud for you to stay just a floor above it. You remember going upstairs. You remember a loud crashing noise you thought may have come from the house next door. “It was either that or make-up sex from downstairs,” you tell them. The walls are thin in your house.

You tell them that the man yelling had been here before. You remember standing at the door that divides your house and the tenant’s, in a sort of hushed laughter with your friend as the man rapped along with Eminem about a week ago. You remember the the time he smoked cigarettes in the basement and stunk the house up. They ask you if the man yelling was white, hispanic or black. You say you’ve never seen him. They ask if you could just tell by his voice. “How am I supposed to know,” you tell them. But all you think is that only a white guy would rap like that.

***

The detectives place the time of death between the crash you heard and the moment your dad found the body. When news sources cover it, they say Michael’s throat was slit, his back stabbed several times. The papers call him by his legal name: Sanjeev Seekoomar. Some papers spell his name wrong. Some papers claim the house was ransacked and robbed. Other papers claim that he was killed by a male prostitute. You and your family start to refer to the killer as Michael’s jealous lover.

You start to notice the people on the street who slow down to look at your house, people rubbernecking in their cars. Strangers start leaving magnets on your gate advertising homicide clean-up services. The detectives finally let you change the lock on Michael’s door.

You get strange visitors, like one man who says he knows about the killing but would love to rent the apartment and just needs a tour of the space. One time, while browsing Google for answers the detectives aren’t offering, you find pictures someone took of your house. You read their blog entry. You hate how the author describes the visit like an adventure. You hate how he describes his curiosity as “macabre.”

***

You start leaving lights on around the house. You start locking doors at every opportunity. You don’t really sleep for two weeks. Then the homicide detectives let your family know that they’ve arrested the killer. They tell you his name. They tell you where they found him. Years later, you learn they caught him through a “trap and trace” on Michael’s phone. You often think about how there was just a door between your apartment and Michael’s — one that may not have even been locked.

In the fall, you will go to college and the way you lock doors will get on your roommates’ nerves. You will lock them out during trips to the bathroom down the hall. You will lock them out while you take naps. When you hear a couple yelling at each other in a dorm room nearby, you want to leave, you practically call campus security. Later you find out its some sort of joke between friends to yell at each other like that. It’s just a thing people do.

***

You graduate from college. Your parents hire workers to tear out the linoleum tiles in that apartment that have had stains in them for years. You all assume the stains are from a hot spot on the floor. When there is new flooring, you move down there with your boyfriend. The rent in the city is too expensive to live anywhere else, but your mom hires a feng shui guy who instructs you to face your bed north for good luck. You keep calling it “Michael’s apartment” until you don’t. You make yourself at home. You replace his old shower curtain. You buy new blinds. You invite friends over. You stop using his silverware. And one day, you actually like it down there. 

To read the full essay, click here.