Kat Stafford

Detroit Free Press

The missing mother of a toddler whose decomposing body was discovered in an abandoned Detroit apartment Wednesday has been found in a psychiatric ward at a local hospital, police said.

"The mother was located early this morning at a psychiatric unit," Detroit Police Officer Nicole Kirkwood confirmed Thursday morning. Kirkwood said the child's father has also been located, but he is not a person of interest at this point, since he's been incarcerated for quite some time.

More details were not immediately released by the police. Police declined to release what hospital the mother is in or why she's being treated. The Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office has identified the three-year-old boy as Aaron Minor. The boy's cause and manner of death is still pending, according to a medical examiner's office spokesman.

Police said Wednesday that the mother had collapsed nine days earlier on the apartment's lawn and was hospitalized for at least two days. The mother could be charged in the boy's death for leaving her child alone in their apartment on Trumbull, west of the Lodge Freeway and five blocks south of I-94.

Wednesday afternoon, an apartment maintenance man found the toddler after he was drawn to the unit by a bad odor, Moreno said.

According to police, the toddler had been dead more than a week after being left alone, police said. Investigators were unsure about his exact age because he recently had a third birthday and may have been dying, or dead, on that day. Police have declined to disclose the date of his birthday.

Officer Jennifer Moreno said there were no obvious signs of trauma to the boy, but his death is being investigated as homicide. Moreno said police have a record of an EMS run last week to aid the boy's mother.

“On May 16, there was a 911 call about a woman down on the front lawn there,” Moreno said. “We’re not sure if it was a medical emergency or an overdose.”

EMS took the woman to a hospital in Detroit, then transported her the next day to a hospital in Ann Arbor, after which the woman was released, Moreno said.

Detroit Police Capt. Darin Szilagy said at the scene that the child's mother had been found unresponsive and lying in the grass at the complex.

“We don’t know if that was a factor” in the death of the child, found lying on a bed in the apartment, Szilagy said. "We don’t know if he was deceased prior to that or after. We just don’t know."

At least one neighbor said she saw the woman and boy late last week, which conflicts with what police are reporting.

April Fowler, 28, said she last saw the boy's mother and the boy late last week, possibly Thursday, as the mother pushed the boy in a stroller to a nearby corner store. She said she was neighborly with the woman but not a friend.

“It was pretty much normal because she does on a day-to-day basis, early in the mornings or mid-afternoons — she walks her child in a stroller, goes to the store and comes back,” she said.

Contact Katrease Stafford: kstafford@freepress.com or 313-223-4759.

Reporters Matt Helms and Bill Laitner contributed to this report.