Silence still prevails concerning a motive as courts and the coroner await further word from sheriff's investigators on the case of the Pelzer teen charged with kidnapping and killing his four year old half-sister.
Both "cause of death" and "manner of death" on are stamped "pending investigation" on Thursday's autopsy report on the body of Joanna Lockaby. The report's narrative briefly notes that the little girl's body was discovered in a plastic bin in the woods behind her family's home on Chevy Chase Boulevard, Wednesday afternoon after she had been reported missing.
Arrest warrants accuse 17 year old Micah Hester of seizing the little girl "with malice aforethought," and forcing her into the container. The homicide report said the child suffocated. Hester remains in the Greenville County Detention Center's juvenile lockup, ordered by a county magistrate to be held without bond pending arraignment in Circuit Court where he will eventually be tried as an adult.
In what he called a "plea for mercy" at the bond hearing Hester's father told the magistrate his son -- in his words -- "must've gone crazy or something," adding that the teen loved his half sister and would never had deliberately harmed the her telling the judge "I know my boy."
