Brooklyn police say the scene discovered in Chava Stirn’s apartment looked like something straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock remake: The 28-year-old woman lived with her deceased mother’s skeletal remains and even dressed in the clothes her mom wore at the time of her death — an estimated two or three years ago.
“It’s a scene right out of Psycho,” an officer told The New York Post. “This is one of the weirdest cases I’ve ever seen.”
According sources who spoke with law enforcement officers, Chava and her mother, 61-year-old Susie Rosenthal, lived together for years. Neither ever left the apartment and only got food when relatives left packages by the front door, so neighbors weren’t particularly suspicious. One tenant said the only indication something was wrong was when she would occasionally hear someone scream “I kill myself, I kill myself!”
The truth came out on Monday when the building’s super tried to gain access to the apartment so he could investigate a leak. Emergency workers eventually knocked down the door. They found Chava “in a chair, looking disheveled, surrounded by waist-high piles of trash” and discovered her mother’s bones on a makeshift bed of trash bags in the kitchen. Authorities said Chava apparently propped her mother’s body up for dinner time and slept beside her in the kitchen.
After telling police she believed her mother “left her there to die,” Chava was taken to the Maimonides Medical Center for a psychological evaluation. The cause of Susie Rosenthal’s death is still under investigation.
