Human remains found in a construction dumpster outside a vacant Rosedale home earlier this week have been confirmed as belonging to a little girl as young as four years old, police say.
The remains were located in a dumpster outside a home on Dale Avenue near Castle Frank Road late Monday afternoon.
Police say that an autopsy has now confirmed that the remains belong to a girl who was likely between the ages of four and seven.
Investigators believe that the remains were left in the dumpster sometime between 12 p.m. on April 28 and 4:45 p.m. on May 2.
Police, however, say that the girl may have been deceased as early as this past summer, or perhaps even earlier.
“We have the best investigators in the Toronto Police Service working this case with everything they’ve got and so we will identify this little girl and we will be doing all the work that we can for her,” Insp. Hank Idsinga told reporters during a news conference on Thursday morning.
Police haven’t formally classified the girl’s death as a homicide at this point but Idsinga said that detectives with the homicide unit are actively involved in the investigation with the understanding that “kids don’t just die.”
He said that as part of the investigation officers are looking back on old missing persons reports and have identified “a couple which come close” but none that investigators have narrowed in on at this point.
“Yesterday during the post-mortem was when we got the first general idea of the size of this child and the approximate age. It’s still fairly new information. We literally got that information at about 6 p.m. last night and I’ve been digging through it since then,” he said.
The girl is described as Black, of African or mixed African descent. She was about three-foot-six, with a thin build and black curly hair that was in four short ponytails, two of which were braided and secured with black and blue elastic bands.
Her remains were wrapped in a crochet blanket inside a plastic bag. That blag was then wrapped in a colour blanket. Police have released an image of that blanket in the hopes of triggering someone’s memory.
Police say that the cause of death has not been determined.
