Young Boy's Body Found Inside Abandoned Las Vegas Themed Suitcase

The dead body of a young boy was found inside a Las Vegas themed suitcase over the weekend in Southern Indiana, state police said.

The shocking discovery was made Saturday evening, April 16, by a homeowner looking for mushrooms in a heavily wooded area of eastern Washington County.

“This time of year, there are lots of mushroom hunters out in the woods,” Sgt. Carey Huls of the Indiana State Police told Oxygen.

“[They] observed something out of place there in the woods — it was a horrific find — with the multi-bright-colored suitcase with the Vegas strip emblem on both sides. He went to investigate and made that horrific discovery.”

Police believe the unidentified boy is around five years-old, and is described as a black boy approximately four feet tall with a slender build and short haircut.

The cause of death remains unclear, as preliminary autopsy results came back inconclusive, officials said. A toxicology analysis is still pending.

Authorities speculated the boy could be from a different part of the state or country.

“We still haven’t identified this young man — even after the autopsy we don’t have a lot of answers that we were looking for, even the cause of death,” Huls said.

“We just really want to help because the longer this goes on, the more and more it looks like it could not be a local boy, a local child.”

“We’ve looked at everything here and working with our schools in this area, nobody has [been] reported missing that would match this description, nobody’s been truant that would match this description. Everybody’s accounted for,” he said.

State investigators said they are in contact with numerous law enforcement agencies around the country regarding possible matches to other missing children’s cases.

“The wider we spread this net, the information going out, the more likely we’re going to get the answer and be able to identify this young man and give him a voice,” Huls stated. “He may not be from this area, maybe not even from this country. Anywhere we can get the word spread out there, it could be somebody in New York or Los Angeles, someplace that says ‘hey, this sounds familiar.’”

Police say anybody with information on the boy should call 1-888-437-6432.

“Our investigators have been in touch with those investigators and others in the country that are close matches at this point, although the autopsy was completed yesterday, nothing is coming back saying that would be a match in that case,” Huls said. “We don’t have any case that’s already listed out that looks like it’s a match. We’ll still be open to working with those agencies if they feel like we need to.”