'Cop Turned Killer' Found Guilty Of Kidnapping And Murdering 16-Year-Old Girl

A former Georgia police officer was convicted on Wednesday of kidnapping and murdering a 16-year-old girl who went missing as she was walking home from a friend’s home.

Miles Bryant, a former police officer in Doraville, a suburb north of Atlanta, was found guilty ofmalice murder, felony murder, kidnapping and a false report of a crime in the death of Susana Morales, who disappeared in 2022. Her body was found months later in the woods, WXIA-TV in Atlanta reported. Bryant was found not guilty of attempted rape.

Morales was initially reported missing in July 2022 by her mother, who said her daughter never returned to their Norcross home from a friend’s house nearby, according to an incident report obtained by HuffPost.

The family said they last heard from Morales at 9:40 p.m. on July 26, 2022, when she messaged her mother that she was on her way home, according to a news release from the Gwinnett County Police Department.

Her mother told officers that Morales did not pick up her phone after that text, though her sister was able to track her phone’s location through an app until 10:30 p.m. that day

Morales’ body was not located until Feb. 6, 2023, when the Gwinnett County police responded to a report from a passerby who said they found skeletal remains while walking in a wooded area about 20 miles east of her home, according to an incident report.

Dr. Carol Terry, Gwinnett County’s chief medical examiner, testified that the cause of death could not be determined due to decomposition of the body, according to WXIA-TV.

Bryant’s gun was found near Morales’ remains, the Gwinnett County police said at the time. On the night she was reported missing, the then-officer with the Doraville Police Department had made a report to