It may have been a cop

On July 26, 2022, at 9:40 p.m., 16-year-old Susana Morales of Norcross, Georgia, texted her mother and told her she was on her way home from a friend's house.

She never made it. 

An app on her cell phone showed she was walking in that direction between 10:07 and 10:21. It's possible, though, she may have gotten into a vehicle. 

Her phone gave her location until 10:26 p.m., at which point it either died or was turned off. 

For the next six months, Susana's parents waited for some word from their daughter, that she was alive, that she was coming home or wanted to come home. 

The neighborhood put up "missing" posters, and a persistent poster on the app Nextdoor kept posting about Susana. The poster also criticized the lack of action of the Gwinnett County Police Department, who apparently considered Susana a runaway.

On February 6th, 2023, someone called the police saying they believed they'd seen human remains in the woods. 

It turned out to be Susana's body.

Learning that a beloved daughter is dead is bad enough. 

What happened next borders on the horrific.

On February 13th, a 22-year- old cop who lived in Susana's neighborhood -- and whom people knew, a person who played ball with the kids in their apartment complex -- was arrested and charged with filing a false police report and concealing a body. 

He worked for the Doraville police department (located in neighboring DeKalb County, GA) and, upon his arrest, he was immediately terminated. 

Read that again:  A cop -- a policeman -- a law enforcement officer -- a person we are supposed to trust to uphold the law, was arrested on charges of concealing a body and filing a false police report. 

His name is Miles Bryant and he'd worked for the Doraville police department for two years. 

He has not been charged with her murder. 

I live only a few miles from where Susana disappeared. It is scary to think that such a man, knowing that her parents and family and friends would want to know where she was and what happened to her, allegedly deliberately chose to hide her body and keep his mouth shut about it. 

Since he has not been charged with her murder, I wonder if Bryant had an accomplice, if indeed he was involved in her death. 

I admit, I wondered if Susana might have been a runaway. It's too easy to think that a teenager who disappears has just run away from home. 

Now we will never know from her whether she went with someone willingly or if she was taken by force. 

I was going to write, "I am appalled." But I think the proper phrase is, "I am angry." I am angry that a person who swore to uphold the law allegedly violated it in such a horrific way. 

The woman on Nextdoor who kept posting about Susan, reminding us that "she's still missing," is angry because, in her opinion, the Gwinnett County Police Department didn't take Susana's case seriously enough. Perhaps she would have been found sooner if Gwinnett County had treated her disappearance as foul play and not simply as a runaway teenager. Or, if nothing else, maybe her body would have been found sooner and her family would not have suffered for so many months not knowing what happened to her. 

Instead, we find a decomposing body.

And we have a police officer implicated in her death. 

I'm one of those who wants to say, "not all cops", but that is cold comfort to the Morales family, or the too-long list of families who have been mistreated or just not taken seriously by the police.  I'd be angry, too, if I thought my child was missing, not just a runaway, and the police gave me the, "Are you sure he/she didn't just run away?" I know that police have to consider all possibilities, and that there are teenagers who run away . . . but some teenagers do get abducted and murdered. 

The Nextdoor poster also said, "no wonder Susana's posters kept getting ripped down. He (Bryant) lived in Norcross!" She suspects that Susana's "missing person" posters were deliberately being removed.

I don't know if that's true.  

But I do know that a young woman was missing for six months. 

And now she is dead.

And a man sworn to uphold the law is implicated in her death.

I don't know about you, but it is terrifying to think that someone who wears a badge can even think of being involved in committing such a crime. 

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.