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Experts explain why BRPD needs 2 weeks before starting landfill search for missing teen's body
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BATON ROUGE — Baton Rouge police and the FBI are preparing to search a landfill for the body of 15-year-old Ja'Derrius Minnieweather, with the physical search expected to begin around July 13.
Mayor-President Sid Edwards announced at BRPD Headquarters that Maurice Parms, 51, was arrested on murder charges in connection with Minnieweather's death and has not provided any information on where the body is.
Investigators believe Parms put Minnieweather's body in a dumpster, where it was picked up on a collection route and taken to the North Landfill.
The landfill covers around 400 acres and receives about 1,600 tons of waste a day on average. Thanks to records that show what trash was dumped where and when, police will focus on a smaller half-acre section of the landfill.
Crews expect to search through five to seven days of trash in that targeted area. That amounts to an estimated 8,000 to 11,000 tons of trash that will have to be searched through by hand.
The search will be delayed about two more weeks because of the logistics involved in carefully moving large amounts of trash. Experts must prepare and coordinate special heavy equipment that will be used in the operation.
Baton Rouge Fire Chief Michael Kimble compared the process to the search for identifying details after the Twin Towers collapsed.
"If you can go back in your minds and think back when the Twin Towers collapsed, days after you watch people going through hand by hand, item by item to try to identify anything, that is the kind of situation that these men and women are going to encounter when we start this operation," Kimble said.
Josh Gill, incident commander for the United Cajun Navy, said the landfill is an active crime scene and that a set process must be followed. The United Cajun Navy spent the last three weeks helping with the search.
"This thing is patience. Everybody needs to have a little bit of patience. And I know it's super, super important that we get it done quickly, but again, they have to be as thorough as possible."Gill said.
Forensic scientist George Schiro, who has more than 40 years of experience in DNA and crime scene investigations, said the large-scale search could be hazardous due to unstable conditions at the landfill.
"They need to gather the proper resources to do what they do. They may need heavy equipment. They need machinery, excavators, bulldozers, that sort of thing, which is out of the normal purview of what crime scene investigators usually have to deal with," Schiro said.
He said searchers should expect to encounter decomposition and insect activity at the scene.
"I've experienced many crime scenes where we've had bodies that had been decomposed, have had animal predation, have also had insect activity. And that's all things that we're trained to deal with and to collect and preserve the evidence as best we can," Schiro said.
Schiro said the preparation period is critical not only to find answers for the family but also to make sure evidence is preserved for court.
"It definitely requires a little more, well, you know, more attention and again, more organization and more coordination whenever doing anything, you know, on this scale," Schiro said.
BRPD Chief TJ Morse said the landfill is being treated as an active crime scene and asked the public not to go to the area. "Knowing the sheer complexity before us, we sadly know success is not guaranteed," Morse said.
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