Dad Of Woman Found In Trash Compactor Thinks She Was Murdered

GRAMERCY, NY — The father of the woman who fell 27 stories down a trash chute where she was crushed in a compactor last Tuesday isn't buying detectives theories that her death was an accident or a suicide, the incensed father told the New York Post.

“She was brutally murdered in a sadistic way. She would have never done this to herself,” Nicholas Prychodko, whose daughter lived in the luxury condo building where she was found dead, told the newspaper.

Lara Prychodko, 48, was discovered by a maintenance worker inside the trash compactor at Zeckendorf Towers "crushed from multiple angles" just before 5 a.m., police said.

Investigators say Prychodko fell 27 stories down the chute into the basement compactor. The city's medical examiner's office has yet to release an exact cause of death, but police are "leaning toward accidental" in how they are treating the investigation, authorities said.

Prychodko was seen alive in surveillance footage staggering from an elevator on the 27th floor of the tower near Union Square and her abandoned purse was discovered nearby, police sources told the New York Post.

But NYPD spokesman Lt. John Grimpel maintained that there is "no evidence at this time that she was murdered."

Prychodko's father finds that determination "inconceivable. It’s incredulous. It’s preposterous… She had no reason to go into that area. She had just gotten off the elevator,” he told the Post.

The newspaper reported that Lara Prychodko was in the midst of a heated divorce with her husband of 13 years David Christopher Schlachet — the owner of Manhattan-based construction company Taocon. Prychodko had lost custody of her 9-year-old son and was under a court order for regular drug and alcohol testing at the time of her death, The Post reported.

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