A family in Alaska who were clearing out a deceased relative’s possessions made a grisly discovery when they opened a chest freezer at a family home.
As reported by Action News 5, the incident took place in Juneau on Sunday, with family members contacting the Juneau Police Department after they breached a locked building outside the house, opened a chest freezer, and discovered what appeared to be human remains.
The identity of the deceased relative and the frozen remains have not been made public, but investigators have reported that the body in the freezer is male and “may belong to an adult relative”. Their next of kin has reportedly been notified, but an official identification is pending.
No missing persons report filed
The rest of the story remains a macabre mystery. Cops have confirmed that it’s difficult to ascertain how long the body had been in the freezer, have confirmed that there was no missing person’s report connected with them, and have not been able to figure out a cause of death.
Juneau Deputy Police Chief Krag Campbell said,
“I can only speak for Juneau, but [this is] very unusual, not something I’ve seen or heard of before. … I think that’s the biggest kind of unknown is ‘When did they get put in the freezer? That’s going to help pinpoint our investigation and do that as well as collecting evidence to see who might have done this.”
Investigators said they don’t believe there’s any danger to the public, that an autopsy is pending, and that more information will be revealed soon.
People storing human remains in their freezers indefinitely isn’t as rare as you’d imagine. In a broadly similar case, a Missouri man was clearing out his deceased mother’s apartment when he remembered a box in the freezer that his mother had always carried between houses, but made sure no one ever looked inside.
She told her family it was merely the fragile top of a wedding cake. But, after her death, her son Adam Smith looked inside to discover the mummified body of a baby wrapped in a pink fleece, with later investigations revealing it to be a boy under one year of age who died sometime in the mid-1960s.
There’s also the infamous Detroit “Freezer mom” Mitchelle Blair, who is serving a life sentence for the torture and murder of two of her children, 9-year-old Stephen Gage Berry and 13-year-old Stoni Ann Blair. They were discovered wrapped in plastic bags in her freezer, where they’d been for years. In a grisly detail, cops said it took three days for them to thaw out enough to conduct an autopsy.
Further details of the Alaska case should be made public soon as the investigation proceeds, though it certainly appears that a death (whether by natural causes or homicide) was being concealed from the world.
Published: Jul 23, 2026 06:36 am