A human skull detached from its body has been found in Oakland, and investigators say there may be clues found in a decomposed torso found near the same location. 

There may be a link to a human skull found in the backyard of a home and the headless body of a person found a few blocks from the location.

“This may be a bizarre case, very bizarre situation where someone died, was there for a significant amount of time, their body decomposed, that head became separated from the body and ended up a block away,” Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Ray Kelly said.

The decayed skull was found Friday at a home on 29th Street in Oakland. Back on Sept. 26, a skeletonized body was found in the basement of an abandoned building on the 2800 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The Alameda County Coroner’s Office is tasked with determining if the two cases are connected.

“So, what we are doing now is DNA analysis on the detached skull and that torso to see that it is one and the same,” Sgt. Kelly said.

With no apparent signs of foul play, investigators feel it is important to let the public know that there is no one out there decapitating people in this neighborhood.

“There may be some fear in the community that anytime you hear a story about a head being found in the backyard that there is something sinister going on,” Sgt. Kelly said. “We are looking at this as a case where possibly someone, maybe a transient or a homeless person died, they were not discovered and that during the decomposition process, the skull was separated from the torso and ended up a block away.”

As gruesome as that sounds, discovering a dead body is not uncommon these days.

There is a lot of people who don’t have family, who live alone, that don’t have any loved ones that check up on them,” Sgt. Kelly said. “We’re trying to figure out is that the case here?”

In regards to the skull and the torso being found in two separate locations, officials at the Alameda County Coroner’s office say one possibility is an animal moving things from one location to another.

“There’s many reasons why that could have happened,” Sgt. Kelly said.

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