A missing five-year-old girl, whose mother was accused of offering her for sex, has been found dead off a heavily wooded road in North Carolina in the US, ending a week-long search.
Fayetteville Police spokeswoman Theresa Chance declined to comment on a cause of death or the condition of Shaniya Davis's body.
"We've got a lot of people out at the scene right now that are torn up," Chance said. "Detectives have been running off adrenaline to find this little girl and to bring her home alive. You have a lot of people in shock right now."
Two people have been charged in her disappearance, one of them her mother, Antoinette Davis, 25.
Police charged Davis with human trafficking and felony child abuse, saying Shaniya was offered for prostitution.
Authorities also charged Mario Andrette McNeill, 29, with kidnapping after they said surveillance footage from a Sanford hotel showed him carrying Shaniya there.
Authorities said McNeill admitted taking the girl, though his attorney said he would plead not guilty.
Authorities first arrested a man named Clarence Coe, but charges against him were dropped a day later when investigators tracked down McNeill after receiving a tip from a hotel employee.
Additional information led investigators to a search site near Sanford on Sunday. They continued searching , scouring miles of landscape, roads, ravines and fields on four-wheelers and with helicopters.
After Shaniya's body was found, a solemn group of searchers met quietly at a nearby fire station to ensure that all volunteers were accounted for.
"We were hoping that someone could carry her home," said Syd Severe, 42, who came from Raleigh to help with the search. "It's just sick."
A cluster of emergency vehicles and law enforcement personnel gathered where Shaniya's body was found, near Highway 87.
Authorities blocked access to the road, a rural area popular with hunters that is about 1.5 kilometres from a large lakeside community.
Shaniya's father, Bradley Lockhart, said he raised his daughter for several years, but last month decided to let her stay with her mother. He had pleaded for her safe return.
"I should've never let her go over there," he told The Associated Press.
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