In the borough of the Bronx, the discovery of a man's death on October 27, 2016, unfolded into a tale with two starkly different narratives. The man was identified as 51-year-old Kenneth Howe. One account of that day suggests a violent and tragic end to his life at the hands of another. In this version of events, Mr. Howe, an ambulette driver, was found brutally beaten to death inside his vehicle.
His colleagues had become concerned when he missed his scheduled pickups and was no longer answering his phone. Using GPS to track his ambulette, they were led to a remote location in the Bronx where they made the grim discovery. Mr. Howe was found in a pool of blood with the front-door window of the ambulette shattered, indicating a violent struggle had taken place. Law enforcement classified his death as a homicide, though the motive for the attack was unclear. As of the report, no suspects had been identified and no arrests had been made in connection with his death.
A second, conflicting report from that same day paints a very different and lonely picture of Mr. Howe's final moments. According to a New York City Police Department spokesman, the body of Kenneth Howe, a resident of Harlem, was discovered in the back seat of a car parked on Balcom Avenue in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx. In this account, he was found with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. This led authorities to investigate the death as a possible suicide.
These divergent accounts leave the circumstances surrounding the death of Kenneth Howe shrouded in mystery. One path of the story leads to a search for an unknown assailant responsible for a violent murder, with a family and community left to wonder who could have committed such an act. The other path suggests a solitary and desperate final act. To date, publicly available information has not reconciled these two accounts, leaving the true story of what happened to Kenneth Howe that day in the Bronx unclear.
