Staff report

AUSTINTOWN — A heavily redacted police report released Wednesday by Austintown police Chief Valorie Delmont sheds a little more light on the suspicious death investigation from Sunday.

According to a report released Monday, an officer went to the home at 1155 S. Raccoon Road, near the 911 Memorial Park, to conduct a welfare check around 3:15 p.m. Sunday. The address is blacked out in the report released Wednesday.

The narrative in the report states officer Chad Phillips went to the house for a welfare check on a 17-year-old girl. He said he spoke to a woman, identified as the girl’s mother, who he described as “standoffish” and who “barely cracked the door to speak to him.”

Phillips said he asked the woman if there were children inside the house and she said she had two young children, according to the police report. Her 12-year-old son was called to the door to speak to Phillips, who described the boy as “normal.” The boy told the officer “everything was fine at the residence,” according to the report.

When Phillips asked about the woman’s 17-year-old daughter, she told the officer that the teen “ran away to be with her father in Cleveland,” the report states. The woman said the girl left about a month ago and she had no contact information for her and would not provide Phillips with any further information.

As Phillips was leaving, Austintown dispatchers told him the 911 caller, who requested the welfare check, wanted to speak with him at Austintown Middle School, which is across the street from the home.

Three people met with Phillips and one of them said he had spoken with the mother via cellphone before calling police. The caller said the mother began saying that her “son is God” and her daughter was sick and needed to be healed by God and that she “is gone.”

Phillips reported that the caller asked the mother to clarify what she said and she told the caller that “God sucked the soul” from her and began talking about how people “are marked as demons” and God told her she needs to “take them out.”

The caller told Phillips the mother implied several times that someone had killed her daughter “to heal her,” the report states. All three complainants told Phillips the mother is “crazy” and all of them believed she “could and would” hurt the girl. Phillips told them he had spoken with the woman’s son and he appeared to be a normal child.

However, the complainants said the boy now believes he is God and speaks strangely, according to the report. Police were able to reach the girl’s father, who told police he had not seen his daughter since April 2025 because he was in prison. He told officers he believed his daughter may have been harmed and her mother “is capable of hurting her own child,” the report states.

Phillips requested backup from all available units and they went back to speak to the woman. They said she was hesitant to answer them and kept looking to her son to answer, the report states. The boy told officers he was God and that the incident “had to happen.”

The woman and her son finally told officers that the girl was in a bedroom, but the door was taped shut so they could not get inside. When officers asked the mother why the door was taped, she told them it was because the daughter “started to smell.”

After being read her rights and placed in handcuffs, the mother told officers that her daughter had been deceased inside the bedroom for at least a month and she sealed the door and windows to “prevent the smell from escaping,” the report states.

The woman said she knew her daughter was dead, but never called anyone to report it. She also said God, which is how she referred to her son, had to do something to the girl, but she did not know what because she continually told officers she “was not in the room when it happened,” the report states.

Officers went into the bedroom and found the victim lying in bed covered with a sheet. The woman and “the children” were taken to the Austintown Police Department, but it is unclear who the children are because only the 12-year-old boy and the victim were mentioned earlier in the report.

The death is still being investigated, the report states. All of the names in the report were redacted.