A missing 5-year-old Arizona girl who disappeared more than two months ago is now believed to have been thrown in a landfill. Glendale, Ariz., police believe that Jhessye Shockley was placed in a trash can and dumped in a landfill prior to her being reported missing on Oct. 11.
Her mother, Jerice Hunter, was arrested last month on suspicion of child abuse. She has maintained her innocence, although police are zeroing in on her as their prime suspect.
Police are a few weeks away from exploring a local landfill where they believe the child's body may be. Sgt. Brent Coombs of the Glendale Police Dept declined to reveal the source of the information about Shockley's body possibly being in the landfill.
"You have to identify things like which truck picked up a trash on a certain day, what time it went to the transfer station, what truck took it out to a landfill. You have to narrow it down as best as you can, and I'm putting it very simplistically, so it's much more than that … those are the kinds of things that take a long time to identify," he told KPHO.
The Los Angeles Times reports that after Jhessye vanished, child-welfare workers removed Hunter's other three children from her home. Hunter's 13-year-old reportedly told police that Hunter had instructed the children to lie to police about Jhessye wandering off. The child also said that the three of them were told to say that they last saw Jhessye in September, way before the reported disappearance.
Read more at KPHO Phoenix.