There currently is no indication whether the heart is human, but the coroner of Huron County told NYT he believed it to be so upon first glance.
“My initial assumption was, it is not going to look like a human heart,” Jeffrey Harwood, MD, the coroner, said in the report. “When I looked at it I am like, ‘Well, yeah, this looks like it is a human heart, and that is all I can say just eyeballing it.'”
The heart was sent to a forensic pathologist for testing, but results have not yet been returned, according to the report.
Dr. Harwood said he thinks the organ will be a medical specimen of some type, but he added the mystery remains as to why it was left the way it was.
Sgt. James Fulton, a local law enforcement officer, told NYT the situation is unlike any case he has investigated before. “We don’t usually find hearts in zip-lock bags,” he said. “I can’t remember ever having a call like this.”
He said there is such little evidence or clues surrounding the situation. Other than the medics, there are no witnesses to interview, he said. What’s more, if the heart does turn out to be human and is not a medical specimen, it opens up the potential for a homicide, though there has been no body found that could be associated with the case.
“It is hard to say where it came from,” Sgt. Fulton told NYT. “There are hearts that are transported after autopsies, but they generally are not in a zip-lock bag. There are abandoned bodies without hearts, but we don’t have one. I don’t have anything to link it to.”
Law enforcement continues to gather information about the organ and find possible leads. Currently, they are investigating the possibility of the abuse of a corpse, possibly stemming from a theft from a hospital or a funeral home. The heart is also being tested to see if there are preservation fluids, according to the report.
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