MESA COUNTY, Colo. — A human head and arms found in a freezer in Grand Junction early this year have been identified as belonging to a 16-year-old girl, the Mesa County coroner's office said Friday.
The Mesa County Sheriff's Office was called to a home in the 2900 block of Pinyon Avenue on Jan. 12 of this year after people cleaning out a recently sold home found what they thought were possible human remains. The items were determined to be a human head and forearms with the hands attached, the coroner's office said.
All of the body parts were found to belong to 16-year-old Amanda Overstreet, who the coroner's office said was a resident of both Grand Junction and the Harris County, Texas areas.
The remainder of her body has not been located, but her death is being investigated as a homicide.
According to the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, Overstreet was the biological daughter of the previous owner of the home. The agency said she has not been seen or heard from since April 2005 when she would have been about 16. They said there are no records that show she was ever reported missing.
The circumstances surrounding her disappearance remain under investigation, the sheriff's office said.
Sam Troester, lives across the street from where the remains were found in January.
“The white hazmat looking suits, that's what caught my eye at first,” she told 9NEWS back then. “That's what was most surprising.”
Troester told 9NEWS her neighbors moved out earlier that morning and the new ones showed up a bit later to start cleaning.
“It turns out that the new owners of the house posted online that they were looking to sell a bunch of the garbage that was left behind, scrap metal and things that people could repurpose, and there was a deep freezer that was posted up for grabs,” Troester said.
Troester said the people who stopped by to pick up the freezer asked whether they could use her restroom and that's when she started asking questions.
“I let them in and cautiously I was like, ‘What's going on?’ And they continued to tell me that they opened the freezer to empty it so they could transport it and they said a head fell out,” Troester said. “A human head!”