Police discover body of missing 4-year-old boy; cousin arrested

(AP) - Police found the badly beaten body early Sunday of a 4-year-old boy at the north Minneapolis home of an adult cousin who had been caring for him and reported him missing last week.

The woman was arrested and was being held pending charges.

Demond Reed was already dead before police responded to the woman's 911 call last Wednesday claiming that he had been abducted, said Lt. Amelia Huffman, head of the homicide unit.

"The information that led to the suspect's arrest was a statement from a witness that she hit the child several times, the child became ill and subsequently died," she told the Star Tribune.

The Hennepin County medical examiner's office planned an autopsy for Monday to officially determine how and when Demond died.

"He was so sweet," his grandmother, Charmon Brown, told KSTP-TV. "He was a sweet little baby."

Demond and his father, Tony Reed, came to Minneapolis from Chicago for a visit around Christmas, but his father was arrested Jan. 21 on an unrelated matter so the boy was left in the custody of the cousin.

The suspect is a 37-year-old woman originally from Chicago who is a cousin of Demond's father.

Brown, who's Tony Reed's mother, told KSTP she had trusted the cousin to take care of Demond, but that the cousin had hurt the boy and would not admit it at first.

The grandmother, who came up from the Chicago area Sunday, told the station she realized something was wrong when the boy disappeared Wednesday and the cousin couldn't tell a straight story about what happened.

At first, Brown said, the cousin said Demond had walked out the back door and disappeared. Her second story, Brown said, was that she brought the boy to a hospital because he was having an asthma attack, and that a friend of hers kidnapped him there.

"And then she asked me to pray for her," Brown said. "It was amazing, because I felt that something was wrong."

KSTP said the cousin is a mother of five children, who were put in protective custody.

The investigation continued into the circumstances surrounding his death.

"A lot of the details in this case have been fairly unclear," said Sgt. William Palmer, a police spokesman.

When Demond disappeared, the cousin claimed he had been taken by a family acquaintance, but it was unclear Sunday whether there had been any abduction.

Police searched the building Friday, but police dogs failed to find a scent trail in the area. Late Saturday, a second search was conducted, and Demond's body was found after midnight. Police refused to say how or where in the building they found him.

The murkiness was one of the reasons the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension did not issue an Amber Alert for Demond when he first went missing. The BCA said there weren't enough details available, such as a license plate or a description of the person he left with, to warrant an alert.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)