By Sarah Vos
svos@herald-leader.com
GEORGETOWN — Investigators have arrested a Georgetown man whose sister’s body was found mummified last week in the trunk of his car.
Timothy Allen Brown, 30, was arrested Tuesday evening in St. Louis at a public library, Georgetown police Chief Greg Reeves said at a Wednesday morning news conference.
Reeves said Brown was found by U.S. Marshals and the St. Louis police who searched the area where his car was found late last week.
On Friday, the severely decomposed body of Brown’s 31-year-old sister, Penny, was discovered after police towed Brown’s 1998 Chevy Malibu from St. Louis to Kentucky. They had received complaints that it had been on the street for several days.
Investigators obtained a search warrant to look in the car for any clues about Timothy’s or Penny’s whereabouts. Upon receiving the warrant Friday, police unlocked the trunk and found Penny Brown’s “badly decomposed” body, which was wrapped in blankets — an attempt to conceal the decomposition, Reeves said — and bagged with industrial-grade plastic, possibly to contain the odor, he said.
Police have said that Timothy Brown signed his wheelchair-bound sister out of a Georgetown nursing home in 2006, and was cashing the disabled woman’s Social Security Income checks, which were between $600 and $700 per month. Reeves said during Wednesday’s news conference that the remains may have been in his apartment for two years. It isn’t clear how she died.
While Penny Brown might have been dead for two years, Reeves said no missing person report was made until Sept. 20.
Reeves said they think her body was in a back bedroom of Timothy Brown’s apartment. They found evidence consistent with that when they searched the apartment on Tuesday, Reeves said.
Timothy Brown is the father of an 8-year-old son, whom the state removed from the Georgetown apartment around the time that the missing person’s investigation began. Reeves said Timothy Brown disappeared shortly after that.
Investigators think the body was in the apartment when the child was in the home. Investigators say Timothy Brown then put the body in the car and fled.
“We believe that the body was moved to the vehicle at some point after the child was removed from the home,” Reeves said Wednesday.
Brown is up for an extradition hearing today.
RECENT COMMENTS