Cullen Camic first noticed the chicken carcasses on Friday morning when a AAA repairman was inspecting his car battery.
Something — a thick, wet line of white and pink — glistening in the soft morning sun caught his eye. It stretched several blocks of Bond Street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, past century-old brick townhomes, a Citi Bike rack and a corner bodega. And then there was the sound.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be in a war,” Mr. Camic said, “but it was just crunching of bones.”
Every car and truck that pushed through the scattered parts unleashed a series of mini pops, snaps and cracks. Chicken was flattened and flung. There were thighs and wings, and pieces so big that Mr. Camic thought they had to be from turkeys.
“It was how you’d imagine that much meat being crushed by a 10-ton truck,” said Mr. Camic, 35. “It was amazing.”
How the poultry ended up on a residential street was not immediately clear. But there were clues. There are several butchers nearby, as well as a few meat processing centers not too far away. (None answered their phones on Friday afternoon.)
Mr. Camic said the meat smelled fresh, at least at first, and there were pieces of cardboard scattered among the carcasses. He called his girlfriend in their apartment and told her that she must see what he was seeing.
“You got to come down to check out this crazy situation,” he recalled telling her.
With her phone, she recorded a 20-second video of the scene: piles of poultry parts and streaks of sinewy fat and skin rendered into greasy streaks on the street. A friend posted it on Twitter.
“HORRIFYING,” a person responded to the post.
Another person added, “The chickens obviously never made over the road.”
But soon after the video went online, Bond Street already looked much different. While Mr. Camic waited on a new car battery, a city Department of Sanitation employee arrived and waved traffic away. A bulldozer-like machine then appeared and started scooping up the parts, he said.
A spokeswoman for the Sanitation Department said that a street sweeper showed up around 10 a.m. Another truck with water was on its way in the afternoon to “address any remaining street residue,” the spokeswoman said.
A few hours after the incident, Mr. Camic said there was hardly a sign of the gruesome scene from the morning. He also had a new car battery and was packing for a Labor Day weekend trip to the Jersey Shore.
“It doesn’t even smell,” he said. “It was like a mirage.”
