The mother of a man found dead inside a Queens school chimney says she is hiring a private investigator because police have no leads on how her son ended up there.
Sophia Wood, whose son Matthew Collado was identified last month as the body discovered June 30 at P.S./I.S. 113 Anthony J. Pranzo in Glendale, told the Daily News she has been walking around “in a daze” since learning the remains were his. Collado, 29, of the Bronx, was an aspiring rapper who performed under the name A.K. Nash and posted tracks on SoundCloud.
“There’s a void in my gut,” Wood told the paper. “I still haven’t believed it yet.”
Wood said she last heard from Collado the day before Mother’s Day, when he told her he would spend the holiday with her at his grandmother’s nursing home. He never showed up. She spent the weeks that followed plastering missing person flyers around the neighborhood and searching for answers online, not knowing his body was already wedged inside the school smokestack at 87th Street and 78th Avenue.
The discovery came only because a janitor called in a pest control worker to investigate a putrid odor that students later said had lingered for weeks. The exterminator opened the ash dump and found a shoe, roughly size 9 or 10, then felt a foot inside, according to the custodian, Brendan Chavez, and law enforcement sources.
A spokeswoman for the city medical examiner’s office confirmed Thursday that both the cause and manner of Collado’s death remain “pending further study.”
Wood flatly rejected any suggestion her son climbed into the chimney voluntarily. “My son was afraid of heights so him climbing up there? That is not my son,” she said. “He hates fire. He hates smoke. A chimney? It doesn’t jive with my son and who he was.”
Collado was raised in East Elmhurst and had been set to start a new job as a residential aide at a Breaking Ground shelter before he disappeared, according to his mother. His music, which she now plays to hear his voice, lives on through his SoundCloud uploads.
“The cops have nothing. There’s no cameras. There’s no videos. No footage of how he ended up there, how he got into the school,” Wood told The News. “There’s nothing.”
The NYPD said the investigation into Collado’s death remains ongoing.