Nearly 20 years after a teen girl vanished, police have positively identified some of her remains, found inside a freezer a new homeowner gave away to someone else.
“Through DNA testing, the victim is identified as Amanda Leariel Overstreet,” said the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado in a statement received by ABC News on Friday. Overstreet was approximately 16 years old when she disappeared.
The shocking revelation began January 12 when the sheriff’s office got a call about a “suspicious incident” in Grand junction. When they arrived they discovered what someone else had found while picking up a free appliance from a new homeowner.
“Upon arrival, deputies found the head and hands of a human had been discovered in a freezer,” police said in their statement. Nine months later, and through DNA, the sheriff’s office was able to positively identify the remains as Overstreet.
The Mesa County Coroner’s Office told NBC News that they were investigation the teen’s death as a homicide. Aside from her head and forearms with hands still attached, the rest of her body has not been found.
The biological daughter of the home’s previous owner, officials stated there is nor record that Overstreet was ever reported missing in 2005. Only through current investigation after the discovery were they able to determine that she’d not been seen or heard from since April 2005.
Speaking with Phoenix Fox affiliate KUSA in January, a neighbor reported that the individual who’d showed up that day to pick up the free appliance dropped by their house to use the restroom. While there, the neighbor asked what was going on.
“I let them in and cautiously I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ And they continued to tell me that they opened the freezer to empty it so they could transport it and they said a head fell out,” the neighbor told the news station. “A human head!”
Speaking with ABC News, one neighbor talked about walking his dogs by the house and encountering a smell “like a mildew, and it was just utterly disgusting, ilke actually would make you sick just walking by.”
“The circumstances surrounding her disappearance remain under investigation, as well as ongoing forensic testing of evidence,” the sheriff’s office said in their statement.
The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office also emphasized citizens to note that the home involved is under new ownership completely unrelated to their ongoing investigation, per ABC news urging them to “respect the current owner and their neighbors’ privacy and avoid driving by the home or taking photos.”
