Nearly six months after finding his 3-year-old niece suffering from hypothermia and dying from starvation, Philip Simmons says he’s still haunted by the image tattooed into his subconscious when he found the little girl in pigtails and a pink outfit lying facedown on the floor.
Simmons told police he found Tiana Mills’ nearly dead body in an upstairs bedroom of his family’s Brooklyn home after noticing the girl’s dehydrated twin sister hunting for food and milk in the kitchen.
But by the time he discovered Tiana on June 23, she was already passing away.
Investigators are calling her death a “cruel homicide,” reports the New York Daily News, and they want to know how is it remotely possible for this girl to get to this fatally malnourished state in a house full of relatives.
“I was in shock,” Simmons, 21, told the publication. “I called 911. My mother started bursting out in tears. I said, ‘She looks dead.’ ”
Tiana was pronounced dead at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center
The medical examiner said the autopsy reported that she was starved before her shocking death on a 91-degree summer day. The cause of death: hyperthermia resulting from malnourishment and dehydration. He listed the girl’s death as a homicide, but police have yet to make any arrests.
The Brooklyn district attorney and police were investigating and are looking to see if they will file charges against the adults in the home in the avoidable death of what relatives called an “upbeat little girl.”
