It was more than a month after strange screams for help were heard inside a building in Nebraska that the body of a missing man was found in a chimney.
A warrant for Zachariah Andrews’ arrest was issued more than two weeks after he went missing, police said. Andrews was identified as the victim on Wednesday.
Maintenance worker in Norfolk, Nebraska (110 miles northwest of Omaha), found Andrews’ body on 19 October while looking into a bad smell coming from the apartment chimney.
Norfolk Daily News reports that the worker saw what looked like shoes hanging from the shaft.
People last saw Andrews alive on September 15, but she wasn’t officially reported missing for another 19 days.
The day after Andrews was last seen, someone living in the apartment building called Norfolk police to say they heard strange screams.
In a statement, police said, “The resident said that he heard a man yelling for help and that it seemed to be coming from the first floor.”
When the police got there, the strange screams stopped.
The police searched the property and talked to several residents, but none of them heard the cries for help. They then left without finding the source of the noise, leaving Andrews to die in the chimney.
According to the Madison County Sheriff’s Office, Andrews is wanted for seven counts of violating a protection order. He was reported missing on October 3, which was also the same day the warrant was issued.
Andrews has been trying to reach an unnamed woman on Facebook over and over again for a few months now. Several of his friends have told him to stop bothering her, and one told him to remember what he learned “in treatment.”
Andrews says in one post that the police read his “love letters” to her and told him that his plans to be with her “weren’t realistic.”
“But I kinda want to show them they’re wrong,” he wrote in May.
In 2018, Andrews was also charged with trying to get a 12-year-old girl who was selling a swimsuit on Facebook to buy something from him.
He allegedly told her in a text message that she could come over to his house for a drink and to “see what happens,” along with other sexual comments, according to Siouxland Proud.
Also, he was charged with resisting arrest because he kicked police officers when they tried to arrest him for beating up another man in April of last year.
A parking ticket was put on his car, which was right in front of the apartment building where he was stuck, while he was gone.
“I can’t imagine how you felt being trapped, but now you’re free, my brother! You’re free in God’s hands!” “Angel, spread your wings,” my friend Josh Isenbart wrote on Facebook.
“My friend, I will always remember the good times I had with you there until we meet again. You are no longer in pain and are now in the best place you can be.”
The police think Andrews died by accident, but they are still looking into it.
