Human remains found by trash collectors on Chicago's West Side

CHICAGO - Human remains were discovered by city trash collectors in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side Wednesday morning.

The remains were found around 8:55 a.m. in an alley in the 4900 block of West Washington Boulevard, Chicago police said. Detectives were conducting a death investigation while an autopsy was being conducted.

A photo obtained by the Sun-Times shows the lower half of a male body.

A source with knowledge of the investigation said Streets and Sanitation workers found the remains, which had apparently been brought to the alley on the West Side and dumped there. The person had been "dead for a while," the source said.

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Identifying the remains will likely prove challenging because key identifiers, like fingerprints and teeth, are missing, according to the source.

"You gotta start looking for missing people, so just reverse-engineering it and trying to figure it out," the source said.