Jeremiah Oliver.Photo: Facebook
A grand jury in Massachusetts has indicted a man for allegedlymurdering a boy whose body was found stuffed in a suitcaseon the side of the highway nearly a decade ago.
On Thursday, Alberto L. Sierra Jr., 32, was indicted on charges of murder and disinterring of a body in connection with the death of 5-year-old Jeremiah Oliver, according to a press release from the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office.
Sierra was ordered held without bail and is expected back in court on May 25. It’s not immediately clear if he has entered a plea or retained an attorney to comment on his behalf.
Jeremiah, who lived with his mother and siblings in Fitchburg, was reported missing in late 2013, the prosecutor’s office said.
His body was found the following April — seven months after he vanished — in a suitcase on the side of Interstate 190 in Sterling, some 10 to 15 miles from his home,PEOPLE previously reported.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner eventually determined Jeremiah’s death to be a homicide and listed the cause of death as “homicidal violence of undetermined etiology,” the release states.
Sierra was dating Jeremiah’s mother, Elsa Oliver, at the time of the boy’s disappearance, which was reported two months later after the boy’s older sister expressed her concerns to a teacher,CBS News reports.
Accordingto MassLive.com, Jeremiah’s mother and Sierra were convicted of assaulting his two other siblings before being placed in state custody. In one instance, MassLive reports, prosecutors said the siblings were forced to kneel in a cold shower as a punishment.
In 2017, Sierra was sentenced to six-to-seven years in prison for assaulting Elsa Oliver and Jeremiah’s two surviving siblings, according to the district attorney.
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As for Oliver, she pleaded guilty in 2017 to two counts of reckless child endangerment and one count of assault and battery for the abuse of her two surviving children, prosecutors said. She was sentenced to seven-and-a-half-years in prison.
To this date, Oliver has not been charged in connection with her son Jeremiah’s death and disappearance.
“We need to investigate the death of Jeremiah Oliver to determine what happened and then file the appropriate charges,” a prosecutor’s spokesman told PEOPLE in 2017.
Prosecutors did not immediately share what information or evidence led to the murder charge against Sierra.
source: people.com
