Landscaper fatally runs over mother sleeping in California park with lawnmower – Law Officer

A homeless mother sleeping in a California park was killed last week after she was run over by a lawnmower — and investigators left “chunks” of her body strewn across the grass, her family claims.

The New York Post reports that Christine Chavez, 27, was lying in the tall grass of Beard Brook Park in Modesto around noon on July 8 when an employee riding a John Deere tractor with a pull-behind mower swept the area.

The unidentified worker said he didn’t see the sleeping woman until he “noticed a body in the grass he had already made a pass through,” Modesto police said.

The employee called 911, but Chavez was pronounced dead at the scene.

Family members said their grief has been compounded by what they called a disrespectful, botched clean-up.

“They left big chunks of her all over the place, just covered up with the grass,” the victim’s sister Rosalinda told Fox 40.

Chavez’s father, Christopher, said he was able to pocket pieces of his daughter’s bones, skull and teeth in the days after her death.

Chavez, who has a 9-year-old daughter, had been transient for the last three or four years and often slept at the park.

Other homeless people said they saw Chavez wash her hair in the park’s creek before going to sleep on a hill near the playground and baseball field.