A mother has been charged with murder after the bodies of her two young daughters were found stuffed inside suitcases at a Cleveland park, authorities said.
Aliyah Henderson, 28, was booked into the Cuyahoga County Jail on two counts of aggravated murder on Wednesday evening for allegedly killing Amor Wilson, 10, and her 8-year-old half-sister Mila Chatman.
Police detained Henderson after detectives completed interviews, searched a residence, and examined evidence.
A child was also found inside Henderson’s home in good health and has since been placed under the care of the Department of Children and Family Services
Mila’s father, DeShaun Chatman, said on Thursday that he had been fighting to find his daughter and was pursuing custody of her for five years before investigators tragically told him on Wednesday that she was dead.
He was not married to Henderson, but the pair lived together for about a year after Mila was born.
Chatman last saw his daughter in 2020 when she was just three years old — and has repeatedly sought emergency custody and tried to locate her through a child welfare agency.
His attempts were unsuccessful because he did not know where his daughter was living.
“It’s very much horrible,” Chatman said, heartbreakingly adding that it turned out Mila had been living within view of where their bodies were found.
He said he felt “useless — I couldn’t save my baby.”
The two brutalized “juvenile black females” were found stuffed inside suitcases and buried in shallow graves in a playground in Cleveland near the Ginn Academy, the only all-boys’ public high school in Ohio, on Monday evening, Cleveland police said.
Cleveland local Phillip Donaldson came across the gruesome scene around 6 p.m. Monday when his testy pooch refused to move off a mound of dirt at the playground.
When Donaldson dredged up the first suitcase, he shockingly found “somebody’s head in it” — before frantically calling 911, he told News5Cleveland.
Investigators at the scene discovered a second body in another suitcase in a shallow grave nearby, Cleveland Police Chief Dorothy Todd said at a Tuesday news conference.
The bodies of the two young girls were there for “some time,” Todd told reporters, noting the bodies had not been dismembered.
The cause of their deaths has not yet been determined.
“It is traumatic for everyone,” Todd said. “It is traumatic for those who live in the area to know that this was right there at their doorstep.”
The Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
With Post wires
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