The unit at Hidden Valley Apartments where a mummified girl was found in June 2023. (Screengrab via WSB-TV)
A call from a disconnected cellular phone led police in Georgia to a gruesome discovery over the weekend: the mummified body of a young girl who was haphazardly hidden in an apartment closet.
Late Sunday evening, an officer with the DeKalb County Police Department arrived at the Hidden Valley Apartments on Misty Water Drive in Decatur – the county seat and part of the Atlanta metro area – in response to a mysterious and macabre phone call.
“The comments on the call stated a 8-10 year old juvenile was deceased in the closet,” the DKPD incident report obtained by Law&Crime says. “The complainant did not give any further details and called from a disconnected cell phone.”
A neighbor told the responding officer that a former tenant moved out “a couple of months” ago and that she had not seen her since then, the police report says.
Police did find a child in the closet to apartment number 29 – but she was much younger than what was described on the phone call.
“I checked the location and observed what appeared to be a juvenile female (approximately 2-4 years of age) deceased in the closet,” the officer wrote in the report. “I observed what appeared to be a full head of hair and decayed flesh that was in the form of an arm and leg.”
After confirming what the caller had said was more or less true, homicide detectives took over the investigation, the police report says.
On Thursday, a spokesperson for the DKPD told Law&Crime that there are currently no updates in the case because the department is still waiting on a report from the medical examiner.
One man, however, told local NBC affiliate WXIA that he was the one who made the discovery – choosing to remain nameless.
“She looked like a real mummy,” he said. “You could tell it was a young girl by what she had on and by her hair.”
According to the anonymous man, he happened upon the scene around 4:00 p.m. on June 25 and saw the door to the apartment “wide open,” the TV station reports. Then, as he got closer, he said he noticed an awful “stench.” The man went inside to investigate, finding the lights off, all the furniture still in its place, with objects strewn about the countertops as if someone had “left in a hurry.”
Investigating further, the man told WXIA, he noticed another open door. Then, he said, he saw a human arm hanging out of the closet.
“I had to stand there for like a minute or two before I realized what it was,” the man told the TV station. “It’s a dead child.”
Other apartment tenants are aghast.
“It’s an atrocity it really is,” next-door neighbor Catherine Costello told local ABC affiliate WSB. “It’s a shame that humanity can get that low.”
Costello also recalled a woman living in apartment number 29; she said she did not remember ever seeing a child there.
“I was shocked to think that something like that would happen right close to me,” the next-door neighbor told local Fox affiliate WAGA. “The child never went out of the apartment. Didn’t go to school. There was nobody to say, ‘Where was this kid?’ And that’s sad. It’s a sad statement about the world we live in.”
Other neighbors told WSB that homeless people often slept in the unit – insisting that it was not empty.
Anthony Shelton also spoke with WAGA.
“It’s terrifying,” he said. “It’s just sad. For a child just be in there for that long period of time, it’s just heartbreaking.”
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