Missing New York Head Chef’s Body Found at Hostel, Police Say

Andrea Zamperoni, a chef at a popular restaurant in New York's Grand Central Terminal was found dead on Wednesday at a hostel in Queens. (NYPD)

The body of a missing head chef at a popular New York restaurant was found in a hostel in Queens after he went missing for several days, said police.

Andrea Zamperoni, who had been a chef at Cipriani Dolci in Grand Central Station for 10 years, didn’t show up for work on Aug. 19. Coworkers then alerted law enforcement, said the New York City Police Department.

“We have sadly learned that Andrea Zamperoni, a well-respected and beloved member of the Cipriani team for many years, who went missing last Sunday has been found deceased,” the restaurant told Fox News on Thursday.

It added: “His brother is overcome with grief and regrets he will not be available to provide any comments. We will keep Andrea’s family in our thoughts and prayers and respect their privacy during this difficult time.”

His body was located at the Kamway Lodge in Queens. His cause of death wasn’t released, Fox reported.

“Andrea was a responsible, good-hearted, kind and very hard-working individual who will be deeply missed by all of us,” Cipriani told Fox. “We trust the NYPD is exerting all efforts to investigate and bring clarity to this tragic situation.”

Zamperoni was last seen leaving the restaurant at around 9 p.m. on Saturday.

Police sources told CBS New York that the 33-year-old’s body was wrapped in a blanket “as if someone was going to dispose of it.” A woman led police to the body first.

According to CBS New York, his manager, Fernando Dallorso, said that when he didn’t show up for work, his “phone was going to voicemail… by the time he didn’t show up to work at one in the afternoon we really started to worry.”

He said he isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, and his family lives in Europe.

“He talks to his mom every day in Italy. All of a sudden his mom calls me Monday asking where her son is,” chef Manuel Ignacio Albo told the CBS affiliate. “His passport is still in his apartment and he’s here on a work visa that’s the only documentation he has. So how can he be going anywhere without his passport?”

Before Zamperoni was found dead, Albo added: “Everyone in the company is freaking out we’re talking about a globally run company. We have thousands of people right now freaking out for Andrea his family in Europe is freaking out.”

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

Missing Children

There were 464,324 missing children reported in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in 2017, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Under federal law, when a child is reported missing to law enforcement, they must be entered into the database. In 2016, there were 465,676 entries.

“This number represents reports of missing children. That means if a child runs away multiple times in a year, each instance would be entered into NCIC separately and counted in the yearly total. Likewise, if an entry is withdrawn and amended or updated, that would also be reflected in the total,” the center noted.

In 2017, the center said it assisted officers and families with the cases of more than 27,000 missing children. In those cases, 91 percent were endangered runaways, and 5 percent were family abductions.

About one in seven children reported missing to the center in 2017 were likely victims of child sex trafficking.

The number of reported missing children has significantly decreased in recent years, according to a 2017 report by the Department of Justice (pdf). The number of children reported missing dropped from 6.5 per 1,000 children in 1999 to 3.1 per 1,000 in 2013.

Missing children typically fall into five categories: kidnapped by a family member, abducted by a nonfamily perpetrator, runaways, those who got lost, stranded, or injured, or those who went missing due to benign reasons, such as misunderstandings, according to the report researchers.Crime Facts in the United States