A man was found unconscious with his ex-wife’s dead body in the back of his truck near Oak Beach following a Lindenhurst house fire early Sunday morning, Suffolk County police said.
Lindenhurst Fire Department firefighters responded to the house fire on North Erie Avenue and found evidence of a struggle in the bedroom at 4:15 a.m., police said.
“It appeared to them that something had occurred in that bedroom that was not related to the fire,” said Detective Lt. Gerard Pelkofsky of the Homicide Squad.
Police found the man slumped over in his Chevrolet Tahoe, which was parked at Sore Thumb with a woman’s body wrapped in a blanket in the back.
“It does appear that he was attempting to take his own life,” Pelkofsky said.
The man is listed in serious condition at a local hospital. The woman’s cause of death is under investigation.
The identities of the man and woman were not immediately released, but police did say that although the couple were divorced, they had been living together.
“It went from being a house fire to being a very sad story,” said a neighbor, Louri McElgun, who lives nearby.
McElgun added that the man who lived in the house had asked another neighbor to take care of his cat prior to the fire.