UPDATE: Modesto Man Says Sister Is Body Found In Stockton Apartment
STOCKTON (CBS13) -- A Modesto man says his sister is the badly decomposed body found in a Stockton apartment.
The body had no face. Investigators can't even tell if it's a man or a woman. It was found in the bathroom at the complex on East Channel Street. The property manager who made the discovery believes the body is that of a woman.
"It was lying on the floor," property manager Rebieanna Mitchell said. "There was no (recognizable) face. You could see the foot. It had a sock on it. He stomped her face; we saw a foot print."
But a Modesto man says he knows exactly who it is.
"This is my one and only sister Veronica Jones," Isaac told CBS13.
The 35-year-old mother of 10 has been missing for nearly seven months.
"Sometime in the first two weeks of June is the last time we saw her," he said.
When Isaac heard that a body had been found in the apartment where his sister had lived with her boyfriend, Devon Epps, he knew it had to be her.
Isaac says investigators have told him they are 99 percent sure it's his sister's body. Stockton police did not return our calls for confirmation and investigators say they're still determining if Jones was murdered.
"We are handling this as a homicide investigation, but it's too soon to say if this body is result of homicide," police spokesman Officer Pete Smith said.
But they are calling Epps a person of interest in the case. They believe he lived inside the apartment with the decomposing body before being evicted Sunday after repeated complaints about his behavior.
But Veronica Jones' family says their ordeal should have been over months ago when they reported her missing and told police she lived in the apartment where the body was found.
"They said they made it to his apartment one time, knocked on his door and he did not answer the door and because he never answered the door, they never proceeded," Isaac said.
Isaac doesn't believe their sister's case got the attention it deserved.
"I gave them that address, the name, and they still did nothing," he said. "All they ever told me is it's not a crime for a person to be missing."
A tenant for about a year, Epps suffers from mental problems and caused a slew of problems, according to management.
"Violence, yelling, screaming, destruction, and women locked in the room," said apartment management employee Leslie Pearce.
Neighbors heard banging on the walls and suspected something was wrong, but no one imagined a body behind closed doors.
"It tosses my stomach i can not even eat dealing with something like this," neighbor Dominick Wilson said.
