Currents carry debris — and sometimes tragedy — to Sunset Park shoreline

Brad Miller takes long walks in Bush Terminal Park three times a day. Often he circles the entire park several times in one outing. “I walk a lot. I'm trying to lose weight,” Miller said. So far, he's lost about 50 pounds.

On Saturday morning, Aug. 22, Miller noticed something floating in the water near the 43rd Street pier. Because he was walking his usual loop, he saw it from several angles. Other park regulars asked him what it was, but he wasn’t sure.

“I did my normal walk through the woods, and I saw something over there,” Miller said. “But at first, I didn't know, maybe kids did something stupid.”

He went home at about 10:30 a.m. An hour and a half later, he returned to the park to read. Police had closed off the pier. “The whole pier was shut down,” Miller reported. “Cops, detectives everywhere.”

According to News 12, police said the NYPD Harbor Unit responded around 11:30 a.m. near 43rd Street and removed an unresponsive woman from the Bay Ridge Channel. Paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene.

“I saw the police loading her into the body bag,” Miller said.

Other park regulars watched the unusual activity in the midday summer sun.

“About an hour later, the coroner came in a big black van,” Miller said. “Loaded out a very morbid looking stretcher and loaded up. Off they went.”

As of Sept. 19, police had not publicly released the woman's identity.

While walking on the pier, Miller recalled several other deaths or near-deaths he said he had witnessed there. “There's weird stuff that goes on here,” Miller said.

On June 30, a teen passenger died after a 17-year-old moped operator lost control on a jetty in Bush Terminal Park, according to police accounts cited by news reports. Miller said the teen who died was not wearing a helmet. Miller also described a man he said overdosed on the rocks along the water but survived, as well as a suicide at one end of the park.

Miller said he witnessed the incidents he described during the nine months he has been walking in Bush Terminal Park.

Referring to the body recovered from the Bay Ridge Channel, Miller said, “I used to be a volunteer firefighter. I've seen a lot of bodies in my life, so... I guess that's why it didn't bother me as much.”

Miller, 37, works as a lawyer, primarily from his home office, which gives him the flexibility to spend many hours walking in the park near his home.

News reports have documented other bodies recovered from the Bay Ridge Channel and nearby Brooklyn waterways in recent years.

Eymund Diegel, an environmental planner and mapmaker who works for the New York City Department of Transportation, told the Sunset Post that objects from the East River often end up along the Sunset Park waterfront because of tides, wind and currents through the waterways around Gowanus Bay and the Bay Ridge Channel.

“Most of the time it ends up on our side because of what we call the prevailing wind and currents,” Diegel said.

Miller pointed to a buoy and other objects that had floated onto the park shoreline. “You see big, huge pieces of driftwood,” Miller said. “I saw part of a refrigerator once washing over here.”

Diegel said the same currents can also carry marine animals, including whales or dolphins.

“If someone jumps off the Verrazano bridge just with the incoming tide, well, it's going to end up with us, (in the Gowanus Bay),” Diegel said.