Stepmother strangled 10-year-old Indiana girl to death before throwing body in shed and telling family that she ran away
GAS CITY, INDIANA: A 34-year-old woman is accused of strangling her 10-year-old stepdaughter to death before stuffing her body in a bag and throwing it in a shed behind her Gas City home. Authorities say Skylea Carmack was already dead when Amanda D. Carmack told her family that she had run away.
Carmack was arrested on Wednesday, September 4, from her Gas City home. She faces preliminary charges of murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury, strangulation, and domestic battery resulting in serious bodily injury.
The girl's father, Kevin Carmack, told FOX59 that he had left her with Amanda and six other children before going to work on Saturday, August 31. According to the authorities, the stepmother strangled the girl between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. and called the police to report her missing around 9 p.m.
On Monday, a statewide Silver Alert (a small scale amber alert) was issued for Skylea. The missing girl was last seen wearing a black shirt with the Nintendo video game characters Mario and Luigi on it, which was paired with black pants with a red pattern and teal high top tennis shoes.
Officers and city volunteers even went from door-to-door in the neighborhood distributing Missing Person flyers and organizing search parties on Monday afternoon. However, there were no signs of Skylea.
"We haven't learned a whole lot more than we've known from the get-go, and that's the scary part," Gas City Police Sgt. Micah Burdette told Fort Wayne's NBC at the time.
Meanwhile, the victim's biological mother, Staycee Smith, took to Facebook to express her frustration. "Someone has to know something," she wrote in a post. "I feel useless like a sitting duck [not] doing enough to help find my baby."
Skylea's dad told reporters he was hoping that his daughter was unharmed. "We haven't been able to find any tracks, none of her belongings laid around anywhere, so right now we're just really in a panic because we can't find anything," he said.
The four-day search for Skylea came to an end around 3 a.m. on Wednesday when authorities found her body in a shed behind her home. The corpse was hidden inside a plastic trash bag.
"In law enforcement, our main focus is who and how, not why," ISP Sgt. Tony Slocum told Indystar. "Trying to rationalize why someone would kill a 10-year-old? There's no rationale for that. That's just an act of cowardice."
The police said that they had no other suspect barring Amanda at the time. "Evidence led us to her," Slocum said. "We believe she is the only one involved."
They are waiting for autopsy results to verify the victim's cause of death. Amanda has been booked into the Grant County Jail.
"Gas City, Grant County is an area that loves, an area that cares," Slocum said. "They wanted to bring this young lady home safely. Unfortunately, those aren't the results we got."