Indiana State Police Attempt to Identify Dead 5-Year-Old Found Stuffed in Suitcase

The Indiana State Police (ISP) continue their efforts to identify a deceased five-year-old boy who was found stuffed in a suitcase in Washington County nearly a month ago.

A resident hunting for mushrooms on the evening of April 16 discovered a hardshell suitcase in a wooded area in the 7000 block of East Holder Road in the southern Indiana county, the ISP reported in a pair of press releases. Inside the suitcase, the mushroom hunter found the small boy’s body and immediately called 911.

“He is described as a black male, approximately four feet tall, with a slender build and short haircut,” the ISP said. Autopsy results indicated the child was about five years old.

According to an image released by the agency, a graphic on the suitcase reads: “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada.”

On Thursday, WAVE reported that toxicology results are still pending. Authorities believe toxicology “information will shed more light on the cause of death,” the ISP said.

In its initial release, the agency stated that investigators believe the child’s death took place during the week leading up to the discovery of the body.

On April 18, the ISP established a toll-free tip line that had received 200 tips by the following day, none of which “led to the identification of the deceased child,” the agency said. Nearly a month and 500 to 1000 tips later, officials are still working to identify the child, ISP Sgt. Carey Huls recently told CNN.

“We are getting a lot of people on the internet searching for missing children, which is not what we need right now,” he said. “We have contact with all of those agencies and we are always checking that. We don’t have a match there.”

While speaking with WDRB last month, Huls noted: 

We really want to know who he is. Because somebody had to take care of him, and somebody’s not talking. Whoever was responsible for this young man — for his care, for his well-being — nobody’s stepped forward. Now, there’s lots of different answers that could answer why that is, but right now, we need to know who that person or people were that were responsible for him so we can find out exactly what happened. And that will ultimately change the direction of this investigation.

“We’re also still waiting for that call that we, we’ve never got from somebody who knows this boy and says, you know, ‘This is what’s happened,’ or knows that they know this child and they haven’t seen them,” he recently told the outlet.

Anyone with information regarding the case is urged to contact the toll-free tip line at 1-888-437-6432.