A father found his 11-year-old daughter strangled to death under her bed in their Texas home on Saturday. The girl was found dead some five hours after she alerted her father to a stranger at their door, according to cops and the grieving dad. The police are still unable to identify the depraved killed.
Police in Pasadena, Texas, received a call from an apartment complex at around 3 pm on Saturday. The caller reported that his daughter was not breathing. Upon arrival, paramedics found the girl unresponsive. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The girl identified as Maria Gonzalez.
Tragic Death
Maria's father Carmelo Gonzalez, 32, told Fox 26 that on Saturday around 10 am, he had just arrived at his workplace when he received a text message from his daughter Maria. She told him over the phone that someone was knocking at their door in Pasadena.
"I told her, 'Don't open the door because I am arriving at work,' and she responded, 'I am in my bed,'" Gonzalez said of the "good, quiet girl" who only recently turned 11.
The father later requested his relatives, who also live in the same building, to visit and check on his daughter since he had not received any further communication from her.
Pasadena Police Chief Josh Bruegger shared during a press conference on Tuesday that an aunt and uncle responded to the request. They found the door open. However, during a preliminary inspection, they were unable to locate her, the police chief said.
When Gonzales returned home around 3 pm, around five hours after his daughter's distressing message about a stranger at the door, he found her lifeless body stuffed inside a laundry basket under his bed.
"They left her under the bed in a plastic bag. They left my poor daughter," Gonzalez told the local outlet.
According to the police chief, the 11-year-old girl was sexually assaulted before being strangled. The young girl also suffered blunt force trauma to her head, as confirmed by the Pasadena medical examiner, who said that Maria had indeed been raped and strangled, as reported by Fox 26.
Killer at Large
The police chief revealed that several persons have offered their DNA to be cleared and that there are no suspects in the "violent, violent crime" according to the investigators. "At this point, the father's alibi checks out, so he is — at this point, at least — not a suspect," Bruegger said.
According to the chief, the dead girl's mother is thought to be in Guatemala and her father and daughter lived alone in the flat.
"I do not know their legal status," the police chief said of the family, stressing that "it's the least of our concerns at this point."
There were no indications of forced entry into the home, and the door was found closed but unlocked when Maria's aunt and uncle first checked the area.
While the apartment complex is equipped with security cameras, the chief suggested that these cameras might not have been recording at the time due to recent storms.
Bruegger suggested that the killer likely knew that the young girl was alone at home during that time. "It seems awfully suspicious that Dad leaves for work and within 30 minutes you've got somebody knocking at the door," the police chief noted.
