DETROIT, Michigan — A 35-year-old mother has been arrested after the authorities discovered dead bodies of her two children that she hid inside a freezer at their own home in Detroit for two years, reports said.
The bodies were discovered on Tuesday when court officers came to their house to conduct an eviction.
Medical examiners waited until Friday for the corpses to thaw enough to determine the cause of their death.
On Friday afternoon, after the autopsies on both corpses, the medical examiner has determined the causes of death to be multiple blunt trauma and thermal injuries respectively. The manner for both children was determined to be homicide, the examiner added.
“Both bodies have been officially identified and the official times of death are listed as March 24, 2015 at 12:49 p.m. — the time their bodies came into the medical examiner’s possession,” Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office explained.
The accused, Mitchelle Blair, is charged with child abuse, but could also face murder charges once proven that she’s behind the crime of killing her 9-year-old son Stephen Gage Berry, and 13-year-old daughter Stoni Ann Blair.
According to Blair’s other teen daughter, it was her mother who killed her two siblings. She said she was even forced by her mother to put one of the bodies in the freezer.
She told authorities that she and her surviving 8-year-old brother have also experienced physical abuse in the hands of their own mother. She said they were beaten with a piece of wood and an extension cord, hit them with a hot curling iron, and burned with a clothing iron.
In August 2012, her mother tortured Stephen for almost two weeks before his death “by tying a belt around his neck, throwing hot water on him while in the shower, and putting a plastic bag over his head.”
When Stephen became ‘unresponsive’, Blair wrapped her dead son’s body using a bed cover and put him in the freezer.
In May 2013, Blair reportedly got very angry with her daughter Stoni when she said she didn’t like her two other siblings. Out of anger, Blair strangled Stoni using a T-shirt and suffocated her with a plastic bag.
Shortly after Stoni became unconscious, Blair forced her 17-year-old teen daughter to put her sister’s body in the same freezer where Stephen’s body is hidden.
The teen described their home asa ‘house of horror’. She said her 8-year-old brother is also aware of the crime. Both of them have not attended school for two years.
The siblings have undergone medical exams and results revealed evidences of abuse, including 25 scars and injuries in the back, old and new. Both of them are now in state’s protective custody.
