Boy, 10, found dead in TRASH CAN seven months after going missing as his mother is charged with hiding his body

Police are struggling to work out who killed a 10-year-old boy who was found shot dead in a plastic garbage can at his mother’s home in Illinois, seven months after going missing.

Zion Staples was dressed only in his Spiderman pants in the when his body was discovered in the garage of the four-bedroom house in Rock Island on July 26.

Neighbor tipped police off

A neighbor had grown alarmed and tipped off social services after mother, Sushi Staples, 38, told her that her son would not be around for Christmas any more.

And she told police she had ‘no son at all’ when they arrived at the home where they found dryer sheets stuffed ‘in every vent of the house’ in an apparent bid to mask the smell and the boy’s body with a gunshot wound to his head.

Rock Island coroner Brian Gustafson said the boy appeared to have been dead since December.

‘Do I know who shot him? No,’ he told USA Today.’I don’t believe we will ever know at this point who shot him, but the case is still an active and open investigation.’

Mother allegedly hid body in bin

‘I had a dead raccoon in my backyard, and we put it in a garbage bag and then put it in a garbage can, and I couldn’t even stand the smell waiting for garbage day,’ one told ABC6.

‘So I can’t imagine, that with the wind directions, that nobody would smell that.’Others said the family appeared to be a ‘normal, Christian family’.

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‘We saw two girls, you know, coming sometimes, like out in the yard,’ said Andre and Danielle Builta.

‘I saw them drawing with chalk in the back driveway. And with scooters out front of the garage, everything seemed really normal.

‘They would wave when they saw us. And so we were like, Oh, they seem pretty friendly actually, for neighbors.

‘It’s a little weird, because all knowing that all the time that we’ve been here, working on the house, and knowing her, knowing what was in the garage, literally like, what, like 30 feet from the house that we’ve moved into, it’s a little bit worrying, kind of scary, but, um, it was it was quite a surprise.

‘I wasn’t expecting that at all.’