The tattoo artist whose body was discovered last week behind the building where he was last seen seven months ago had jumped to his death, the medical examiner’s office has ruled.
Drexyll Tolstoy, 26, was killed by blunt impact injuries caused when he “jumped from height,” as the ME’s office put it.
His badly decomposed body was found last week behind a 17-story Herald Square commercial building on W. 32nd St. that housed the tattoo shop where he worked.
Tolstoy’s mother, Kellie Tolstoy, was critical of police, wondering how his body, so close to his job, could remain undetected for so long.
“How was he found right there? He was there the whole time,” Kellie Tolstoy told the Daily News last Saturday. “He’s been laying there for six months.”
Chief of Detectives James Essig on Wednesday said the victim had been identified through dental records and admitted that even though detectives had been to the building “a couple of times, they didn’t catch it.”
But police recently obtained surveillance footage from a nearby hotel that showed Tolstoy re-entering his building, at which point police returned there a third time and, looking down from the roof, spotted the body, which Essig described as being in a spot that is not easily viewable.
“You have to go up to the roof and look down a certain way,” he said. “He was there quite some time by the looks of the body.”
Tolstoy, who was last seen Sept, 25, had been taking new medication and was under treatment for depression for five years, his mother said last week.
Police said that they started an investigation the next day.
The mother, who could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday, came to the city from her home in Detroit in December to search for her son, who had been living in New York for the past six years.
On Sept. 25 a security camera recorded him leaving about 6 p.m.
His girlfriend of 10 years, Kristian Gonzalez, 27, saw that he didn’t show up at the tattoo parlor then next day…
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