A second doctor now reports that Amanda Wienckowski was murdered, but the family still can't get a homicide investigation started.
When the body of Amanda Wienckowski was found naked and frozen in a garbage tote on Buffalo's East Side four years ago, she had been missing for five weeks.
The Buffalo Common Council's Legislation Committee Tuesday heard the details of her death during a discussion of a bill to make it a felony to treat a body that way.
The garbage tote was found near the home of Antoine Garner who admits hiring her for sex. Garner now sits in jail awaiting trail on several sexual assault charges. But the Erie County Medical Examiner's Office has listed the cause of death as a drug overdose.
The family's lawyer Steven Cohen has hired two forensic pathologists who say it was strangulation. Cohen and family appeared at Tuesday's Buffalo Common Council Legislation Committee.
Cohen said as long as the death certificate states overdose, there can't be a murder probe. The attorney noted that a new autopsy from Doctor Michael Sikirica says the evidence shows it was a murder.
"The wounds on the neck themselves show tissue damage. There's also petechial hemorrhage consistent with manual strangulation or suffocation. There's also defense wounds on her arms that she was fending off an attacker. There's also the fact that her body was found naked, upside down, head shorn, frozen in a garbage tote," said Cohen.
Committee Chairman Ellicott District Council member Darius Pridgen said much of the community is judging the way Wienckowski lived, not the way she died.
"When you have a body that sat in a garbage tote and was frozen for five weeks, you have a lot more evidence then just finding a body and no witnesses. Personally, I think a lot of this had to the fact that so many people had sad she was here as an escort in the city of Buffalo and that she was a drug user," said Pridgen. "It's a human being and someone dumped the body of a young lady."
Cohen said the plethora of forensic television shows allows the average local resident to understand the evidence points to murder.
