St. Paul police are investigating a homicide after a man was found dead Monday morning near the 1400 block of Case Avenue, where a passerby reported seeing him lying between railroad tracks around 11 a.m.

Officers found the man with injuries from an edged weapon and later pronounced him dead at the scene, according to authorities. The death is now being treated as the city’s fifth homicide of the year.

Police have not said what led up to the man’s death, and investigators are still working to piece together what happened before the body was discovered. For now, the case sits in the narrow gap between a public call for help and a fatal scene that offered few immediate answers.

That uncertainty is what makes this homicide case different from a routine late-morning police response: investigators know where the man was found, how he was injured and that he did not survive, but not yet why he was there or who put him in that condition. Until those questions are answered, the city’s latest killing remains open, with the facts still coming in one by one.