NEW YORK, NY — The mother of a 29-year-old man found dead inside the chimney of a New York City public school says she is still struggling to understand how he ended up there. Sophia Wood said she expected to see her son, Matthew Collado, on Mother’s Day, but he never arrived.
Wood said a search of Collado’s apartment in Jamaica found his wallet and phone, but not Collado himself. His family reported him missing on May 13, and surveillance video later showed him leaving his building just after 3 a.m. on May 9, the last time he was seen.
Family search began after Collado missed Mother’s Day plans in Jamaica
Wood said she and her son had planned to meet on May 10. When he did not show up, she texted him and later assumed he was safe, even though she did not hear back right away.
That changed after the family checked his apartment and found the items he had left behind. The discovery prompted a missing-person report and set off weeks of searching with no answers.
Wood said the circumstances were especially difficult because Collado was not acting in a way she recognized. She described his disappearance as out of character and said nothing about it made sense to her at the time.
Foul odor at P.S. 113 led an exterminator to human remains
The case took a startling turn in late June when police were called to P.S. 113 in Glendale, Queens, after an exterminator investigating a bad smell inside the building made a grim discovery. Human remains were found inside the school’s chimney.
The school is a New York City public school, and the discovery triggered a new phase of the investigation. Until then, Collado’s family had been searching for him for weeks without any confirmed sign of where he had gone.
The remains found at the school created the first major break in the case and raised immediate questions about how Collado ended up in such a place, according to his mother and investigators.
Tests over three weeks confirmed the remains were Collado’s
Wood said investigators eventually told the family that the remains belonged to Collado. She said dental records, photographs and the way she had described him were used to confirm the identification.
That confirmation came after a series of tests stretched across about three weeks, leaving the family waiting for answers while trying to process the possibility that the man missing from Jamaica was the same person found at the Queens school.
Wood said learning that her son had been identified that way was devastating. She said the situation felt unreal and hard to accept because it did not resemble the life she knew her son was living.
Police and the medical examiner have not said how he died
Authorities have not yet explained how Collado died. Police said the investigation is ongoing, and the city medical examiner’s office told CBS News New York that the cause and manner of death are still pending further study.
Those unanswered questions are now at the center of the family’s grief. Wood said the circumstances appear strange and deeply inconsistent with what she knew about her son.
The lack of a clear explanation has left the family waiting for official findings while trying to make sense of the timeline that began with his disappearance from Jamaica and ended with the discovery at the school in Glendale.
Wood says the case feels like a nightmare and wants answers
Wood said the emotional toll has been overwhelming. She described her reaction as disbelief and said she feels as if she has been trapped in a nightmare since learning the remains were her son’s.
She said the death does not fit anything she would have expected from Collado’s behavior or routine. For her, the central question remains simple: how he got from leaving his apartment in the early morning hours to being found dead inside the chimney of a school.
For now, the family is hoping that someone with knowledge of what happened will come forward. Until then, Wood said she is left with more questions than answers about her son’s final hours.