A human heart has been found in a salt pile by workers at a transportation facility in Tennessee — and authorities are investigating the bizarre discovery as a homicide.
Workers at the state Transportation Department salt facility in McEwen were making preparations for inclement weather when they made the discovery Thursday — only later confirmed to be a human heart, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said.
The organ was transported to the state medical examiner’s office in Nashville, where testing of tissue samples confirmed it was a human heart ripped from an adult male, Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said.
It’s unclear how long the heart had been sitting in the pile of salt, or how it may have gotten there. By the time it had been discovered, the heart had been severely dehydrated from the salt.
Officials are treating the facility as a crime scene and are investigating the case as a homicide.
Those who saw the heart described it as dehydrated by salt and about the size of a tennis ball. Witnesses told local CBS affiliate WTVF the heart appeared undamaged and as if it had been surgically removed from someone’s body.
“Everybody’s somebody’s somebody, and at the end of the day, it would bother me if I laid down my head at night not knowing that we’d done everything we can for this person and this person’s family,” Davis said, noting it’s been difficult for officials to come up with clues in the mysterious case.
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“Somebody, somewhere knows,” Davis told WTVF.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that additional DNA testing will be performed on the heart in order to try to determine its origin.
The agency said it will also try to track the origin of the salt delivered to the barn.
With Post wires
