On an April day in 1992, a local farmer in Picayune, Mississippi, rummaged through garbage in a dumpster behind Mr. Gatti’s Pizza and pulled out garbage bags containing food waste to take home to feed his animals.
The next day, while feeding the animals, the farmer made a terrifying discovery: a newborn baby girl, wrapped in a towel, with garbage in a garbage bag.
Police were notified and Picayune detectives took photographs and gathered evidence. An autopsy revealed that the child was probably born on the morning of April 15, 1992, was about three weeks premature, and had lived only minutes before being suffocated.
And for more than 30 years that was all that was known. The identity of the mother or who killed the child remained a mystery.
But in 2021, Picayune police reopened the case, along with several others they found deep in the files.
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First they had to find out where the child was buried; the information was lost.
Retired officials gave clues that the baby had been buried in Salem Township, near Picayune. Investigators also learned that Lee’s Chapel Baptist Church had donated the gravesite and parishioners had given money for a headstone for the unidentified child.
In May 2021, a tombstone was found in the church cemetery with the name “Himmelsengel” and the dates “15. April 1992 – April 15, 1992”.
The Hancock County coroner later confirmed that the child buried there was the same child found in the Dumpster nearly 30 years earlier.
About three months later, an agent from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations received a stipend and offered to assist Picayune investigators with the cost of forensic genetic genealogical testing of evidence collected in 1992. The evidence has been well preserved and documented in the years since.
DNA testing identified suspects in Louisiana and brought the Louisiana State Police into the investigation. Investigators, aided by the new tests, determined the child had been killed in Louisiana and dumped in the dumpster in Picayune later that same day.
Arrested this week were 50-year-old Inga Johansen Carriere of Avondale, Louisiana, and 50-year-old Andrew K. Carriere II of River Ridge, Louisiana.
Both were charged with first-degree murder. They were the child’s parents, officials said.
The pair are also facing charges of desecration of a human being for allegedly throwing the baby in the dumpster.
They are being held without bond at Jefferson Parish (La.) Correctional Center.
Picayune Police Chief Joe Quave said the resolution of the case three decades after the crime was gratifying for everyone involved.
“This is proof that law enforcement officers are not giving up,” Quave said. “Even those in 1992 who didn’t know what kind of technology might be available in the future, who did everything they could then and then preserved all the evidence – it’s just a credit to everyone involved, from start to finish.” .”
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