Authorities say they have found the body of a missing Antioch woman concealed in a container in the backyard of a Waukegan resident.
The resident, 52-year-old man Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, has been charged with concealing the death of Megan Bos, who had been missing for more than a month.
Bos, 37, was reported missing by family members in mid-February, and police said Mendoza-Garcia told them that she died possibly from a drug overdose around that time at his home.
He told police that he kept her body in his basement for several days before transferring it to a backyard container. Mendoz-Garcia said he did not have a further plan for the woman’s remains, police said.
Mendoza-Garcia said Bos had come to his home in the 700 block of Yeoman Street on Feb. 19, and sometime that night had snorted some sort of a drug. He said he left her in the basement as he tended to a leaky pipe in a different part of the home, and found her deceased when he came back downstairs.
He destroyed Bos’s phone that night and threw it away, according to police. Mendoza-Garcia said he feared he would get in trouble over the incident, so he did not call the police.
Authorities had been searching for Bos. On Thursday, they came to a Waukegan business to interview Mendoza-Garcia, whom police said had previous contact with Bos.
He told police that she had come to his house on Feb. 19 but had left. But, later in the conversation, he told police he did not want to be arrested at his workplace. After being brought to the Waukegan police department, he confessed to having placed Bos’s body in the container.
Police obtained a search warrant and found her remains.
The autopsy did not show signs of trauma or struggle. Drug test results are pending in the ongoing investigation, police said.
In addition to the concealment charge, Mendoza-Garcia was charged with obstruction of justice and abuse of a corpse, police said.
