The brother of a man whose chopped up body was found in a Brooklyn refrigerator insisted his slain sibling was no drug dealer.
“He was a very good person,” the brother of Kawsheen Gelzer told the New York Daily News. “He wasn’t a drug dealer or bad person. He had a family who always loved him and cared about him.”
Police last week found the 40-year-old Gelzer’s dismembered, decapitated corpse inside a taped-up fridge in an apartment on Nostrand Avenue near Farragut Road in Flatbush. They identified him from his fingerprints.
Gelzer’s death was ruled a homicide, but police haven’t offered any details yet about how he was killed. His death is the first reported homicide in the 67th Precinct in 2024, which saw 17 killings last year.
“We haven’t seen my brother in like three years because he wanted to live his own life,” said Gelzer’s brother, who spoke on condition he isn’t named. “He had family to where he could reach out and be there for but he didn’t want that. We knew that he went missing. We put a report out and everything.”
The mystery of his whereabouts came to a grim end last Monday, when police got a call-in tip about a possible body in 45-year-old Heather Stines’ apartment.
Sources described the apartment as filthy. Inside, police found Gelzer’s body parts wrapped in black plastic bags inside the refrigerator and freezer.
Law enforcement sources describe Gelzer as a known drug dealer who went missing after visiting Stines and her husband, Nicholas McGee. He may have died during an ongoing narcotics dispute with the couple, the sources said.
Stines was the only person in the apartment when police arrived, and McGee is locked up in another state for an unrelated crime, police said.
As cops searched the apartment, a neighbor overheard Stines say, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to jail.’”
Stines, who was charged with concealment of a human corpse, remains held on $50,000 bail. She was also given bail in three shoplifting cases she never returned to court for, according to court records.
Gelzer was a registered sex offender who was sentenced to two years behind bars in 2007 for first-degree sexual abuse. According to state sex offender registry, he was busted for sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy in 2004.
Even so, his brother refuted that the abuse took place.
“He’s not no child molester or nothing like that,” said his brother. “That’s all false allegations that came out years ago. They’re bringing up something that’s years ago that is not even true.”
Though the arrest brought some respite for the family, his brother wondered if Stines had any accomplices that remain at large.
“The suspect has been caught, but we want to know, is there more out there?” the brother asked. “For the suspect we will leave it to justice. We will let justice … do its thing for us.”
“My brother is in a better place now,” he added. “That’s the most important thing.”
___
© 2024 New York Daily News
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
