Synkel Davis is accused of concealing the death of her 3-month-old baby boy. She appears in a mugshot provided by the Roanoke Rapids Police Department.
A North Carolina mother has been charged in connection with the grim discovery of the body of her baby boy stuffed inside of a suitcase in a closet, police said Wednesday.
Synkel Shanice Davis, 34, is accused of one count of concealing or failing to report the death of a child, according to jail records reviewed by Law&Crime.
“I am a grandfather,” Roanoke Rapids Police Chief Bobby Martin said in comments reported by Raleigh-based NBC affiliate WRAL. “I have a very young granddaughter, and when you respond to something like this, you often question why and how this has happened.”
The case came to light Wednesday morning when officers responded to a call at a home in Roanoke Rapids, about 80 miles northeast of Raleigh, about the wellbeing of a small child, police said.
Inside a closet, police found the body of a 3-month-old boy wrapped in a blanket in a suitcase, officials said. The body had been reportedly left in the suitcase for at least 12 hours, WRAL reported.
Police did not reveal the cause of death and said the case remains under investigation.
“We are going on what evidence we have at hand,” Martin told the TV station. “Any evidence that would be recovered on the autopsy of the child would help us make further decisions. Eventually, the other charges could be filed, such as homicide.”
The suspect was being held in lieu of $15,000 bond at the Halifax County Jail, jail records show. Her first court appearance is set for Friday. It is unclear if she has a lawyer.
In an unrelated case in October, a mother from Georgia was accused of killing her 5-year-old son, Cairo Jordan, and hiding his remains in a Las Vegas-themed suitcase left at the end of a seldom-traveled dead-end road in the woods in Indiana. The boy’s body was found with no apparent signs of trauma by a mushroom hunter, police said.
The mother in that unrelated case, Dejuane Ludie Anderson, 37, was charged in absentia by Hoosier State authorities and was last seen in South Carolina in September 2022. As of January, Anderson was still being sought, according to Lousiville, Kentucky-based ABC affiliate WHAS-TV. A suspected accomplice, Dawn Coleman, was arrested in California.