Police digging out body found in concrete grave under Colorado condo

This photo provided by the Aurora Police Department shows Haskel Leroy Crawford, 38. (Aurora Police Department via AP)

DENVER -

Police in Colorado on Thursday continued to dig out a body encased in concrete that was found in a condo crawl space they believe is of a man killed by a friend and alleged partner in crime during a fight last year.

The mounded concrete grave, with apparent human remains visible through its cracks, was discovered Tuesday underneath a condo unit after police got information from the mother of the missing man, 36-year-old Karl Beaman, as well as a neighbour in the condo complex in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, according to court documents.

"Detectives are working with outside contractors to carefully recover the body. The excavation process is estimated to last through the end of the week," Aurora police said in a statement.

The woman who lived in the unit, Casie Bock, told police that her former boyfriend and father of her two children, Leroy Crawford, killed Beaman, possibly by suffocating him with a plastic bag. The slaying most likely happened in June 2022 though she was not sure of the exact timing, Bock told police. Bock said she knew it was sometime between May and September 2022, a period when Crawford was arrested in two different, unrelated cases.

After being arrested Tuesday in Beaman's death, Bock told police that Crawford "forced her" to help him put Beaman's body in the crawl space under her condo and then returned the next day with construction tools and a bag of concrete to cover the body. After cracks emerged later, Crawford returned to add more concrete, according to her arrest affidavit.

Bock told police that Crawford threatened to hurt her if she did not help him and said that she previously had a long, abusive relationship with him. Her lawyer, Elsa Archambault, declined to comment on the allegations.

Crawford was arrested in connection with Beaman's death Thursday, police said.

Online court records show Crawford was being represented by an unspecified lawyer from the public defender's office, which has a policy of not commenting to the media.

Beaman's mother, Kyla Dubberstein of Phoenix, told police she had not heard from her son since around Mothers' Day in May 2022 and hired a private investigator and set up a Facebook page to help find him. She also had tried to report him missing last year in another Denver suburb but he was never entered into a national criminal database as a missing person, the affidavit said.

On April 1, Dubberstein called police in Aurora to tell them that a person, later identified as a neighbour of Bock's, left a tip on the Facebook page that Bock, while high on drugs, told her that Beaman was buried in the crawl space of her condo. The neighbour later told police that Bock recently came to her "freaking out" about people being in her walls. According to the neighbor, Bock said Crawford and Beaman had been stealing catalytic converters and that, after they were caught or almost caught, Crawford became convinced that Beaman was a police informant, got into a fight with Beaman and killed him.