Police are hoping that dental records will help identify the badly decomposed body of a woman found in Calumet City early Thursday in an area where police had been looking for a Chicago woman reported missing more than a week ago.
The body was discovered naked and partially buried in a densely wooded area behind a vacant store about 4:45 a.m. by two Calumet City police officers on routine patrol, according to Calumet City police and a law enforcement source.
After they learned a woman’s body had been found, some family members of Nailah Franklin, a 28-year-old pharmaceutical representative reported missing Sept. 19, went to the scene. Franklin’s immediate family members gathered in a family home in Chicago with detectives Thursday afternoon, but had not been told the body was Franklin’s, according to a family friend.
More Top Picks Best Steam Mop
“I’m just hoping it’s not her,” said Andre Wright, Franklin’s boyfriend.
The woman’s body was too decomposed to determine a preliminary cause of death, or even the woman’s race, police said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office said an autopsy would be conducted Friday, and police said they would use dental records to determine the woman’s identity.
More than 50 people, including some of Franklin’s family members, gathered at the site where the body was found Thursday. Some said they don’t know Franklin but had been praying for her.
The body was discovered after police officers noticed something unusual in the parking lot of the building, and decided to investigate, said Calumet City Police Chief Russell Larson.
Larson would not say what it was that piqued the officers’ interest. “They paid attention to a very minute detail that most people would have walked past,” Larson said.
A law enforcement source said the object was ear buds from a portable music device.
Police had been combing the Calumet City area where the body was found since Saturday morning, when her company vehicle, a Chevrolet Impala, was found in nearby Hammond. “Personal items” of hers then were discovered near an abandoned building not far from where the body eventually was found. On Wednesday, police used FBI equipment to go back over the area, but didn’t find anything.
Franklin, who works for Eli Lilly and lives near the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, was reported missing after she didn’t show up for a work meeting Sept. 19. Text messages from her phone on Sept. 18 said she was going to dinner and would call her family and boss back, but they never heard from her.
Police said Franklin told them a week prior to being reported missing that a man she briefly dated had been threatening her life, and she filed a police report. Police have talked to the man, who a law enforcement source said came to the meeting with an attorney, but have not named him as a suspect in her disappearance.
Franklin’s large extended family and hundreds of volunteers have been working for a week to call attention to the woman’s disappearance, papering the area with fliers showing Franklin’s smiling face and details of the case. Her family has established a $10,000 reward for finding Franklin, and set up a Web site, www.bringnailahfranklinhome.com.
———-