LAKE WORTH, Fla. - An 8-year-old girl who was raped and tossed in a trash bin was near death as officers pulled her out from under chunks of concrete weighing 72 pounds, according to police reports released Thursday.
The documents detail the girl's abduction and sexual assault, allegedly by a teenager staying in the same house she was visiting.
Police discovered the Delray Beach girl in the trash bin at a Lake Worth landfill May 22 about seven hours after she was reported missing from her godmother's home. She was found partially clothed, with what appeared to be the impression of a footprint on her back, according to the reports.
The girl did not initially respond when an officer who spotted her hand and foot in the rubble began yelling and shaking the bin, the reports said. She began wiggling her fingers after another officer arrived.
"Basically her body was preparing to die and began shutting down," Dr. Philip Colaizzo, medical director of the Child Protection Team of Palm Beach, said in the reports.
Before being taken to the hospital, the girl identified her attacker.
"His name is Milagro, but they call him M.J.," she told police.
Milagro Cunningham, 17, faces adult charges of attempted first-degree murder, sexual battery, kidnapping and other counts in connection with his alleged attack on the girl. He is being held without bail and faces up to life in prison if convicted.
According to the police reports, the girl said Cunningham took her from her bedroom late at night and took off her rainbow-colored underpants.
"He came into my bedroom and started to touch me. He grabbed me by the mouth and took me from the house to the park. He raped me. At the end, he tried to kill me," the girl said.
She told police Cunningham choked her before putting her in the trash container, and threatened to kill her with a knife if she said anything.
Investigators found her underpants on an access road to the landfill and found a broken knife with 5-inch blade in the driveway of the godmother's home, according to the reports.
Cunningham reportedly confessed after initially telling police that five men in a station wagon took the girl.
Officials said Cunningham, a native of the Bahamas, was in the United State illegally but escaped the notice of immigration authorities after three burglary arrests last year because his cases were handled in the juvenile justice system.
He was suspended from high school last year after allegedly attacking a female teacher who caught him in the girls' bathroom, according to a separate arrest report released earlier this month.
Also included in the documents released Thursday was a police report by a woman who identified herself as Cunningham's legal guardian and said that, about three years ago, the teen tied up her 3-year-old son and placed him in a shopping bag because he was angry with her. Her name was deleted from the reports.
