The two Black girls found stuffed inside suitcases and buried in shallow graves on the east side of Cleveland were related, the local medical examiner's office revealed Wednesday.
A preliminary DNA examination determined that the girls, who are believed to be 8 to 14 years old, were half-siblings.
"At this time, neither decedent has been positively identified," Christopher Harris, a spokesperson for the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, said in a statement.
The ME's office has not released a cause of death. Cleveland Police Chief Dorothy Todd said Tuesday that neither body appeared to have been dismembered.
The girls were found Monday evening by a dog walker who stumbled across the first body in the vicinity of East 162nd Street and Midland Avenue, near an all-boys public school called the Ginn Academy School, and called the police.
As they were searching the area, Cleveland homicide detectives found a second shallow grave with a suitcase that contained another body.
While police have not determined how long the girls had been buried at that location, the man whose dog sniffed them out told the WEWS-TV that the mound of dirt under which one of the bodies was found had been there at least a week.
"It was like a pile of dirt, and she stopped to sniff ... and she was taking too long," Phillip Donaldson told the station. "So I went back and looked, and it was a suitcase that was half-buried, and I pulled it up and looked in it, and it was a head. Somebody’s head in it."
Todd said the girls were found in an area where there is not much foot traffic. She said they have not been linked to any active missing persons cases in the area.
Police have no leads or suspects and asked anybody with information to call the Cleveland Police Department’s homicide unit at 216-623-5464 or Crime Stoppers at 216-252-7463.
