Dumpster

The North Philadelphia bar where gunfights broke out early Sunday morning, wounding a police officer, is owned by a city firefighter who is now under investigation by his department. "We're going to be taking a real close look at all of this," Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers said yesterday, adding that his department would work alongside the police investigation. "We're reviewing all the facts, and we'll take appropriate action. . . . It's just not good to even be associated with anything like that.

Before the Duka brothers were accused in the Fort Dix terror plot, some of the people who live near them on a quiet Cherry Hill street say, they were bad neighbors. They say lambs were slaughtered in the backyard with a kitchen knife. Fetid diapers were tossed into an open trash Dumpster that sat in the driveway, near an array of cars and pickup trucks without license plates. Roosters ran about. Police cited them repeatedly on disorderly persons charges and for traffic offenses.

Nearly four months since Michelle Nau was last seen, her body has yet to be found. The escort and aspiring real estate agent may have vanished into thin air, if indeed her remains ended up at a trash-to-energy plant in Chester. Or they may be littered over South Jersey, as one of the last people to see her alive has testified. But Nau's body may never be found. Police said yesterday they consider Nau's case closed. They say they know who her killer was - George Conway, a 48-year-old bouncer from Mayfair who was himself killed on March 1, about a month after authorities say he killed Nau in his apartment after a night of drugs and partying.

Friends and family of 19-year-old College of New Jersey freshman John Fiocco Jr. have been granted some measure of closure with the recovery of his body. But investigators probing the Gloucester County student's disappearance will have trouble resting until they find out exactly what happened to him. New Jersey state police confirmed yesterday that the body they found Tuesday afternoon in a Bucks County landfill is that of Fiocco, who disappeared from his campus dormitory a month ago. "There continues to be no evidence of foul play," said Col. Joseph "Rick" Fuentes, the state police superintendent, at a news conference yesterday on the college's suburban Trenton campus.

They're being called the "Fortunate Five. " Five tiny kittens were found last week in a duct-taped beer box that had been tossed into a Dumpster at the Bell Lake Park Apartments in Woodbury. They were spared almost certain death when an 11-year-old boy, told by his mother to empty the trash, heard faint mewing from inside the bin. Yesterday, the feline siblings - two females, Kahlua and Malibu, and three males, Jack, Bud and Miller - were put up for adoption by Furrever Friends, a South Jersey animal-rescue group.

It was blood inside the college dorm Dumpster, and it did belong to John Fiocco Jr. And now that authorities know it for sure, they are shifting the focus of their search for the missing 19-year-old freshman from the College of New Jersey campus to two nearby Bucks County landfills. Investigators yesterday said they would begin digging the trash piles today for any evidence related to Fiocco's disappearance, one week ago today. They're hoping not to find a body. While the details sounded ominous and investigators said they were not ruling anything out, they continued to caution people not to make assumptions.

The search for Michelle "Mikalena" Nau, the sometime escort and aspiring real estate agent missing for more than a month, took police yesterday to a Mayfair apartment where one of her friends was killed last week. Investigators also checked a Dumpster in Fishtown where they believed her body might have been dumped and set on fire, and they planned to travel to a Chester County landfill. Nau, 37, who had been renovating a home in Oxford Circle, was reported missing Feb. 16 by her family.

A 51-year-old South Philadelphia man lay frozen outside City Hall yesterday morning, unnoticed by dozens of people who entered the building. Finally, a pair of construction workers saw the man, clad only in a T-shirt and underwear. Police were called to the scene shortly before 10 a.m. and found Norman Anderson in the snow near a green Dumpster on the west side of the building. Medics pronounced him dead at the scene. Representatives from the Medical Examiner's Office did not immediately do a postmortem exam because the body was frozen, spokesman Jeff Moran said.

Act of kindness shows people still have hearts I was reminded this holiday season that there are still a lot of very good-hearted people out there. I have an elderly neighbor whose diabetes renders her nearly immobile, and her vision is so poor that she can barely see. Her ailments sent her to the hospital recently. To help her out, I offered to clear a walking space in her apartment so that she did not risk hurting herself getting to and from the door. Unfortunately, her many years of illness and incapacitation had left her apartment in complete disarray.

The skulls and bones found in a Logan Dumpster on Monday have been reburied in a Bensalem cemetery. The remains, along with others recovered from the start of construction work at a Catharine Street site near Sixth Street, will be marked by a plaque at Beechwood Cemetery stating when and where they were found, according to William Schwartz, an attorney for the Shaffer Group, which is developing the property. Schwartz said yesterday that he was not certain the bones had come from his client's site but that if they had, he suspected someone was trying to thwart the development "by nefarious means" or wanted to pull a Halloween prank.