A neighbor said she wants to know how it took months to find the 10-year-old boy and what tipped off the police. An autopsy showed his death is considered suspicious, but police have not released any other details. Police officials said the mother, Susi, was taken into custody and charged with concealment of a death, obstruction of justice, and failure to report the death of a child after her 10-year-old son was found stuffed in a garbage can in his mother’s garage. The investigation started when the boy, Zion, was found dead in the garage. The boy’s body had been there for seven months, investigators said.
An autopsy showed the death to be suspicious and not natural. The macabre discovery according to cops was made following a tip, QCT reported. ‘I had a dead raccoon in my backyard, and we put it in a garbage can, I mean, in a garbage bag and then put it in a garbage can. And I couldn’t even stand the smell waiting for garbage day,’ a neighbor told the outlet. ‘So I can’t imagine, that with the wind directions, that nobody would smell that.’
A woman who tipped off authorities told KWQC she had made multiple calls to the Department of Children and Family Services in the past few months because Susi was making odd comments about her son. During questioning, she allegedly lied to an officer about the whereabouts of Zion and claimed she had no son and that his birth certificate was fraudulent, according to a criminal complaint cited by KWQC. It remained unclear whether school officials where the boy had presumably been enrolled had sought to discover the missing boy’s whereabouts. Also unclear is why it took multiple calls to DCFS before any action was taken?
Her neighbors said there was never any indication of anything amiss at the house next door, where a seemingly happy family lived. ‘We saw that, we saw two girls. You know, coming sometimes, like out in the yard. I saw them drawing with chalk in the back driveway,’ her neighbor told KWQC. ‘And with scooters out front of the garage, everything seemed really normal. They would wave when they saw us. And so we were like, ‘Oh, they seem pretty friendly,’’ she said. The boy’s cause of death had not been divulged. The boy died in December. The mother is being held on $500,000 bail pending an Aug. 15 hearing.
