The skull looked like someone had purposely placed it on Marcy Street.
It was sitting flat on a sidewalk Friday, its empty eye sockets staring toward the intersection of Cole Avenue in South Akron, said Larry Clark, a neighbor who took pictures of the skull with his phone.
“It was like Halloween,” Clark said. “But this is real. This is a real mystery.”
Clark declined to share his photos with the Beacon Journal, but he did show them to a reporter Saturday.
In the pictures, the surface of the skull looks charred black in places and there is a tuft of blondish hair clinging to its top.
Some of the skull’s teeth are missing, and Clark said the skull appears to be caved in on the side, as if it had been bashed in.
Akron police and firefighters have blocked off a section of Marcy Street since the skull was discovered.
On Saturday, the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office said it invited Dennis Dirkmaat, the director of applied forensic science at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania, and his staff to document and collect the remains.
Dirkmaat has a long history of helping police across the country solve old cases.
Identifying the gender, race and identity of the remains on Marcy Street will be tedious and take time, the medical examiner’s office cautioned.
But that didn’t stop neighbors from trying to piece together the mystery on their own.
The area around Marcy Street is a mix of tidy homes with flower pots hanging from porches, small industrial buildings and boarded-up houses and apartments.
The skull was found on the sidewalk in front of 1345 Marcy St., an abandoned yellow-brick house that sits twice as far back from the street as other homes around it. It’s vacant, but unlike other nearby vacant properties — including two of the four buildings at each corner of Marcy and Cole — its windows are not boarded up.
The house burned four or five years ago, said Clark, who has lived in three houses and apartment buildings around the intersection of Marcy and Cole over the past decade.
Neighbors wondered if the skull and bones are somehow connected to that fire. Akron firefighters are part of the investigation.
“But how could no one find the bones for so long?” Clark asked.
Neighbors said they know of no missing people from the neighborhood, a place where many know each other by name.
They also doubted an animal carried the remains to the sidewalk because there were no teeth marks or scratches on the skull.
Children playing in the area may have stumbled across it and panicked, neighbors suspected, putting the skull on the sidewalk for grown-ups to find.
“Until this happened, this was a quiet place,” Clark said. “But this ... this is just weird, just strange.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.