45°
Being held on $2 million bail each, pending court appearances Thursday afternoon, are the dead man’s boyfriend, Pedro Garcia, 33, and a friend, 34-year-old Wilfredo Sanchez.
The Cliffside Park men were with Francisco Gonzalez Fuentes, 46, at a party Saturday night in the couple’s Palisade Avenue apartment, Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Only the three were left when Garcia and Gonzalez Fuentes got into an argument and Garcia stabbed the older man in the neck with a large knife, the prosecutor said.
Because the apartment was so small, and he is believed involved in the dismemberment, Sanchez, like Garcia, is charged with murder, Molinelli said.
“He’s part and parcel of it,” Molinelli told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Both are also charged with weapons possession, desecration of human remains and hindering apprehension, the prosecutor said.
Molinelli said the pair put Gonzalez Fuentes’ head and torso into a bag that was later found behind the church, and dumped his lower body and arms in another bag at a nearby construction site.
A third bag containing the hands “was thrown across the street from the construction site,” Molinelli told CLIFFVIEW PILOT, “but we believe a trash hauler may have picked it up.”
“We don’t think it’s necessarily pertinent [to find the hands] to prove the homicide,” he said. “We have enough to charge them based upon the other evidence we have.“
Molinelli wouldn’t confirm a law enforcement official’s contention to CLIFFVIEW PILOT that the pair “gave it all up” — as in: confessing to the crime and giving the prosecutor’s investigators all of the details.
He did say that Sanchez was already in custody last night and that Garcia was picked up late [Tuesday] afternoon.”
“Frisco” Gonzalez Fuentes, a native of El Salvador, worked as a cook and kitchen helper at the Club House Cafe on Palisade Avenue.
He was officially reported missing in a 911 call to Cliffside Park police at 6:19 p.m. Sunday. A K9 search by Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino’s investigators that began at the apartment very quickly turned up the two garbage bags, Molinelli said.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Cliffside Park-Edgewater and receive free news updates.
