The man accused of dumping his boyfriend’s decomposing body into the trash outside their Brooklyn apartment building and head-butting a cop who later arrested him bizarrely claimed he was the officer’s boss, according to prosecutors.
“What are you doing? I’m the captain of the police!” Christopher Moss yelled as he tussled with cops trying to arrest him, prosecutors said at his arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court late Monday.
He also tried to grab a gun from the NYPD detective he head-butted, prosecutors say.
Darrell Montgomery’s remains were discovered about 9 a.m. Friday outside the couple’s building on E. 21st St. near Ditmas Ave. in Flatbush after residents complained of a foul odor.
Moss, 38, was nabbed two days later about a mile away after a tipster called cops to report the suspect’s location.
Kerry Burke / New York Daily News
Workers found the body in a trash bag inside a large blue plastic bin near the building’s garbage area on Friday morning. (Kerry Burke / New York Daily News)
After his arrest, Moss told cops he had lived with Montgomery, 33, for about four years and that the two of them smoked methamphetamines “on a consistent basis,” Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Tziyonah Langsam said during the suspect’s arraignment.
Moss is facing assault charges for fighting with cops as well as a charge of concealment of a corpse.
Sporting a scraggly beard, a grimy black Polo shirt and jeans, Moss said nothing as Judge Linda Wilson ordered him held on $20,000 bail. Concealment of a corpse is not a bail-eligible offense but the charge of assaulting an officer is.
Moss’ legal aid attorney Robert Heilbronn told Wilson his client didn’t actually attack the cops who took him into custody.
“My client was assaulted,” Heilbronn claimed. “In this case, he did not assault the police.”
Arresting officers jumped out of a car and demanded Moss’ ID. When Moss refused “he was immediately punched in his left eye, which you can see, your honor — he has a black eye,” Heilbronn told the judge.
Moss only wrestled with cops because the officers tackled him to the ground, Heilbronn claimed.
Montgomery’s body showed no obvious signs of trauma. It’s believed he likely died from natural causes or a drug overdose.
Moss told detectives he found Montgomery dead in their apartment.
“His body was stiff,” Langsam said in court, recounting what Moss told investigators. “(He) didn’t call the police. (Instead he) tried to place his body in the garbage.”
Surveillance video recovered by the building’s superintendent and shared with cops shows Moss dragging the body out in a blue bin to the garbage area, prosecutors said.
Wilson ordered Moss to undergo a psychological evaluation.
Moss has never been arrested in New York state but he was twice convicted of burglary in Connecticut in the two years leading up to his move to Brooklyn, prosecutors said.
The city Medical Examiner is conducting an autopsy to determine exactly how Montgomery died. No foul play is suspected.
Montgomery’s body appeared dismembered but was later determined to be complete but very decomposed. It was not immediately clear when Montgomery died.
Rebecca White/ New York Daily News
Cops investigate the scene on E. 21st Street in Flatbush, Brooklyn. (Rebecca White/ New York Daily News)
Neighbors told the Daily News that at about 6-foot-3, Moss towered over the slender 5-foot-4 Montgomery but the couple was always seen together in the building, with a 54-year-old tenant noting, “Where you saw the tall one, you saw the short one.”
One 75-year-old neighbor recalled seeing Moss outside the building on Thursday, a day before Montgomery’s body was found. Moss was muttering to himself, the tenant recalled.
“He was front of the building, talking to the sun,” she said.
Montgomery’s family is reeling from his death.
“He just basically put my brother in a fetal position and tied him up in a bag, in a bin, and threw him out and went on and didn’t come back,” Montgomery’s sister Shakeema told The News Monday. “You just sit there and just throw them away, like they’re garbage, like they’re nothing. He was loved. My brother was loved.”
Shakeema said neither she nor her mother ever met Moss and hadn’t spoken to her brother in over a month. She said cops told the family Moss ditched the body when he could no longer tolerate the smell.
“He just decided to throw him out — and just decided to just disperse of him like it was nothing,” she said. “Nobody in their right mind would just sit there and let somebody just rot away.”
