Leah Cuevas murder trial: Homicide detective recounts discovery of body parts

The first thing a Suffolk homicide detective saw when he walked into the high grass on a path from the Gibson Street parking lot in Bay Shore was a woman’s torso, he testified Thursday in Riverhead.

“Just west of that, you came across the legs,” said Det. John Becker, describing the discovery July 8, 2014, of parts of Chinelle Latoya Thompson Browne, 28. The rest of her would be found on three separate days in the following week in Hempstead.

Becker testified at the trial of Leah Cuevas, 44, of Brooklyn, who is charged with second-degree murder. She is accused of stabbing her upstairs neighbor to death on July 5, 2014, cutting her into pieces and dumping the parts in Hempstead and Bay Shore.

Jurors and Suffolk County Court Judge John Toomey Jr. saw what investigators saw in a crime scene video narrated by forensic scientist Roy Sineo of the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory. The video began in the parking lot and continued onto a path that headed toward Maple Avenue through some high grass.

While the video played, Browne’s husband sat in the back of the courtroom in a spot where he couldn’t see the screen.

Two days later, Sineo said he was on Stewart Avenue in Hempstead, where an arm had been found, when he was called to the untidy apartment where Cuevas lived.

Here, Sineo said he and investigators found blood drops on the stairs and on a Dora the Explorer book found in the trash. In the cluttered living room, a blood drop was on a wall a few feet from the floor and another one was a on a window curtain with a palm tree pattern.

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But it wasn’t until almost five months later, on Nov. 26, 2014, that investigators found a bloodstain so large and thick that it had soaked through the carpet and the padding onto the wood floor beneath.

During questioning by Assistant District Attorney Robert Biancavilla, Sineo said investigators missed it in July because they didn’t look beneath a rug that had been on top of it.

DNA testing later showed the blood was Browne’s.

Defense attorney Mary Elizabeth Abbate has told jurors that Cuevas and Browne fought in the living room — explaining the blood on the wall and curtain — but that her client did not kill or dismember Browne.

Earlier Thursday, forensic scientist Clyde Wells identified shoes, boots, a watch, a necklace and other items that had been recovered from a house in Brentwood. He said many of them seemed similar to items Browne was wearing in photos taken of her.

During questioning by Abbate, Wells conceded he couldn’t say they were the same.

But when Biancavilla questioned him again, he said they all came from the same plastic garbage bag that contained a pink diary, which had in it a pay check in Browne’s name.