The Invisible Girl

The discovery of her body shocked the city. How did Neveah wind up dead in a dumpster?

- WENDY GILLIS, CALVI LEON AND JENNIFER PAGLIARO

As part of their investigation after the discovery of a young child's remains in the spring of 2022, Toronto police commissioned a composite sketch of a smiling girl with a trio of ponytails.

For 14 months, she was a ghost.

No name. No story. Not even a missing person’s report.

And so she was defined by a contractor’s unthinkable discovery on a cloudy spring day in 2022, in one of Toronto’s richest postal codes, steps from some of the city’s most lavish homes. There, wrapped in blankets and placed in a cherry red disposal bin, were the decomposed remains of a child.

The girl in the Rosedale dumpster.

For more than a year, police chased her identity. They scoured cases of children who’d vanished nationwide. They worked their way down lists of unexplained school absences. They released photos of the fabric that bound her remains — one decorated with pastel pink and purple butterflies — and commissioned a composite sketch of a smiling girl with a trio of ponytails. Look closely, investigators implored school boards, daycares, neighbours — one memory could be “all we need.”

All the while, the name that eluded investigators was not far from where she was found, in the records of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) of Toronto. Written there was the origin of her tragedy. Just days old, marijuana coursing through her tiny body, she’d been placed into the child-welfare system, where she would spend the majority of her short life, much of it during a deadly global pandemic.

Yet it would take advanced DNA technology and a tip to finally reveal the girl’s identity.

In the year since investigators gave her back her name, precious little else has been revealed about the three-foot-six child found just shy of her fifth birthday — and no one has been held responsible for her death.