MINNEAPOLIS — A body was found in a garbage bin inside a garage at a vacant north Minneapolis home on Sunday. A real estate agent made the startling find as he was getting ready for an open house. He believes he narrowly missed the killer.
The victim is now identified as 51-year-old Reid Christopher Johnson. No one has been arrested yet for shooting him to death -- but the man who found the body provided police with some good leads.
With two open houses scheduled over the weekend for this vacant home for sale on 30th Avenue North in Minneapolis, realtor Josh was making sure everything was in order.
"I opened the garage door and I saw an unfamiliar vehicle there," he said. "I snapped a photo of it, then I called the Minneapolis Police because we obviously needed to get it out of there."
An officer came and ran the plates of the Jeep inside the detached garage. It wasn't reported stolen. The back end was filled with tarps and a garbage can, but what Josh and the officer didn't realize on Saturday was that there was also a body inside.
"I had no idea. It just looked like a mass of construction debris in the back of a vehicle," Josh said.
The next day -- getting ready for his second open house -- Josh noticed the vehicle was gone. But the tarp-wrapped garbage can remained.
"The owner asks me to help tip the garbage can up. I do. It was super heavy. We tipped it up. And I peeled the tarp back and that's where we found the gruesome discovery," Josh said. "I was just shocked. I looked at Bill and said, 'There's an effing body in here. There is a body in here.' He went and looked and his face went the same way and at that time we called the police."
The victim, Johnson, a lifelong Minnesota resident died from multiple gunshot wounds.
"They murdered him. And they wrapped him up in a tarp and threw him in a garbage can and dumped him at a random house," Josh said.
Johnson has a long criminal history, but Josh -- who has experience as a social worker and drug and alcohol counselor -- says no one deserves what happened to Johnson.
"I don't care how big of a hole someone digs in their life, you can dig your way out and nothing like this needs to happen. And I just think of that poor family and what they're going through right now. It's just sad. It's really sad," Josh said.
Besides police having photos and the license plate number of the suspect vehicle there is a church right next door to this house with surveillance cameras on it. Police are hoping the combination of evidence can lead them to the culprit.