Police Investigate After Man Says He Found Baby in Freezer

Police Investigate After Man Says He Found Baby in Freezer
Adam Smith peers into his mother's freezer in St. Louis, where he found the remains of an infant wrapped in a box she kept there for more than 40 years. (Christine Byers/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)

ST. LOUIS—A St. Louis man says a box that had been in his mother’s freezer for decades contained the mummified remains of a newborn baby, which he discovered while cleaning out her home after she died.

Adam Smith told St. Louis media outlets that he opened the cardboard box Sunday expecting to find something like the top of his mother’s first wedding cake or money because she never had a bank account. Instead, he says he found an infant’s body and a pink blanket.

St. Louis police confirmed that they are investigating a “suspicious death” involving an “unknown infant” found inside the home and that autopsy results were pending.

However, police would not answer questions Tuesday beyond an incident summary released on Monday, July 26.

That summary said that police were called to the home just before 1 a.m. on Sunday and did not say where in the home the remains were found.

Smith said police questioned him for two hours and that he provided investigators with a DNA sample. Smith said he knew about the white cardboard box in his mother’s freezer his entire life.

After Smith’s mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in January, he said he moved in with her to help care for her. His mother died from lung cancer on July 21 at the age of 68.

Then, early Sunday morning, Smith said he went into the freezer to get a water bottle and decided to open the box.

KMOV-Box-in-Freezer
Adam Smith said this photo shows the box inside a freezer where he found a dead infant. (Adam Smith/KMOV)

“I still believed the box contained a wedding cake topper. That’s just what I assumed,” Smith said.

When he opened it, he found a frozen baby.

“It turns out it was a baby,” Smith said, adding that the child was wrapped in a pink fleece.

“It still had skin hair and everything, it was mummified,” he said. “After that, I freaked out, put it in the box and called police right away.”

Smith said his mother took the box with her as she moved to four different apartments in St. Louis but that she wouldn’t answer her children’s questions about it. He said he remembers asking his mother when he was 7 or 8 years old why she seemed sad.

“All I can remember is that she told me, ‘My oldest child would have been 21 today,‘” he recalled. “And that her name was ‘Jennifer.’”

He believes the infant in the freezer could be Jennifer; if so, that would mean the infant died about 50 years ago.

“I just have so many thoughts. It’s insane.”

“Even as she was on her deathbed, she never told me what was in that box,” he said.

“That’s what makes me think maybe she did something to this baby and didn’t want to tell anyone because she was afraid she would get in trouble.”

The CNN Wire and Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

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