Woman’s Body Found by Teens : Murder: The victim had been beaten, strangled, wrapped in a carpet and dumped near a school. A group of boys made the grisly discovery.

A group of teen-agers walking to school Thursday morning discovered the body of a woman who had been strangled, wrapped in a carpet and dumped near Riverdale Elementary School.

Police have not been able to identify the victim, who had been beaten before she was killed. The body apparently was dumped on Lewis Street some time Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

Fourteen-year-old Victor Maldonado was walking with four friends to Santiago High School about 7:45 a.m. Thursday when they came upon the roll of carpet across the street from Riverdale school.

“I was just walking around, joking around, you know, and I nudged it with my foot,” Maldonado said. “It felt like Jell-O. We knew it wasn’t just carpet.”

Garden Grove Police Detective Ron Shave said the victim was Latino, between 25 and 30 years old. She was wearing blue, acid-washed jeans, a pink tank top under a black tank top, no shoes and no jewelry. She had gold trim around two of her front teeth, was 5-foot-3, 180 pounds with dark, curly, shoulder-length hair, Shave said.

“We’re hoping the distinctive gold trim around the teeth will give us some leads,” Shave said.

Neighbors and school officials gathered at the scene, but police shielded the body from view with a parked school bus and about a dozen tall cardboard boxes.

Maldonado said he and his friends had tried to use a key to cut the cord that bound the carpet, but could not break it.

“I picked up the back, you know, where the feet are, unfolded it and saw feet, legs, jeans, stuff like that,” he said. “When I opened it up, it was perfectly dry, not wet from the dew.

“It’s sort of scary that it’s in my neighborhood,” Maldonado said as he sat in his white sweat socks. Investigators took his sneakers as evidence because he had touched the carpet with his foot.

Five psychologists were called in to “talk to students and quell any rumors” at Riverdale Elementary where children could be heard on a playground as coroner’s officials loaded up the body.

School officials sent a letter home with each of the school’s 635 pupils Thursday to tell parents what happened and provide phone numbers for counseling if necessary, said Garden Grove Unified School District spokesman Alan Trudell.

Three bus drivers who delivered pupils to the school at about 8:30 a.m. said they tried to distract the children as they drove past the police scene by singing “Row, Row, Row your Boat” and pointing to something in the sky opposite of where the corpse lay.

“They know there’s something going on over here, but by the end of the day, they’ll know for sure,” said bus driver Kathy Costa, 42, as she sat in the bus that helped shield the scene from passers-by. “We ushered them in as fast as we could. We were warned over the radio that something was going on.”