Toddler Buried By Parents, Never Reported Missing

This breaks my heart.  If called to check on the welfare of another child, one has a pretty good idea of what happened here.  The boy was never reported, which likely means either his death was suspicious or the family was in some other sort of trouble that prevented reaching out to authorities.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — A routine child welfare investigation led to the discovery Saturday of a toddler's corpse, buried in the backyard of a Long Island home.

State police unearthed the remains in the dead of night at a tidy house in Farmingdale after being told by the boy's mother that he died two years ago. The circumstances of his death remained unclear Saturday.

The boy, Justin Kowalczik, was about 17-months-old when he died in the summer of 2010, police said. Authorities said the family never reported the child's death.

"It is absolutely a suspicious death and it is being investigated as such," said State Police Major Patrick Regan. "We don't have a cause of death, and to our knowledge, there was never a report made of the child being missing."

Investigators were trying to determine how the child died and why the family kept it a secret.

Officials with Suffolk County's Child Protective Services agency initially went to the home Wednesday to check on the health of one of the woman's three children. They grew concerned when the family couldn't account for the whereabouts of a child born in 2009.