Two days after admitting to molesting and killing 7-year-old Jorelys Rivera, an apartment maintenance man killed himself in prison.
The report of his suicide came on the same day that the Canton police chief resigned following a scathing report that the department mishandled the investigation.
News of the Mr. Brunn’s suicide angered and disappointed some residents at the Canton complex where Jorelys was molested and murdered on Dec. 2. But Jorelys’ mother said she is satisfied.
Ms. Gwendolyn Hogan, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections, confirmed late Thursday that Mr. Ryan Brunn was found unresponsive in his cell at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson at 4:15 p.m.
The 20-year-old was taken to a local hospital and was pronounced dead at 5:37 p.m.
The case has been turned over to the GBI for further investigation and an autopsy is expected to be done on Mr. Bunn Friday, GBI spokesman Mr. John Bankhead said.
It’s unclear who found Mr. Bunn, how he died and how long he had been dead before he was found. It was also unclear if he was under suicide watch at the time.
Ms. Hogan declined to comment any further on the case.
Mr. Brunn pleaded guilty on Tuesday and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He said he lured Jorelys into a vacant unit at the River Ridge Apartments in Canton to sexually assault her.
He then cut her throat, beat her over the head with a roller skate and discarded her body in a trash compactor at the complex before calmly rejoining his roommate and a female friend for a night of Wal-Mart shopping and pot smoking, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"This is the kind of justice that I was expecting for him for all the damage that he made to my little daughter," Jorelys' mother, Ms. Jocelyn Rivera told the paper. "Now I can say that I feel satisfied.”
Mr. Brunn, of Dahlonega, had no criminal history as an adult, but GBI Director Vernon Keenan said Tuesday that investigators had learned he molested two other girls in Virginia and in Lumpkin County, the AJC reported.
Mr. James McCollum, who lives upstairs from the apartment where Mr. Brunn killed Jorelys, told the paper he had been following the case and the sentencing this week.
“As far as I’m concerned, he got off easy," Mr. McCollum said. "He didn’t suffer enough. When you hear how he beat her to death with her own skate, he didn’t suffer enough.”
Mr. Brunn’s suicide came on the same day that Canton police Chief Jeff Lance resigned following the release of a review on the department’s investigation of the case.
The review, ordered by Canton Mayor Mr. Gene Hobgood last month, detailed in a 19-page report that the department didn’t follow its own policies and treated the first-grader’s disappearance as a routine runaway.
The report also said the chief didn’t show up at the scene until mid-morning, about 17 hours after the girl was reported missing and when he did he turned on the television to watch the University of Georgia football game.
It detailed severe lapses in the critical first 48 hours of a child’s disappearance including delays in enter her in the national database for missing persons, inadequate processing and protection of the scene and suspending the search twice.
“Thus, it is clear that if a subsequent missing child report were to be approached in the same manner as was the Rivera case, the Canton Police Department may indeed miss an opportunity to save the victim's life,” said LaGrange police Chief Louis Dekmar, who did the review.
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