MANSFIELD — A body found in a Mansfield park on Sunday belongs to an Ashland woman, a Richland County Coroner’s Office investigator said Tuesday.
The remains belong to Shealeah Lachelle Staley, said Bob Ball, the coroner’s chief investigator.
Her body was found covered in leaves in the woods of North Lake Park on Sunday morning.
Staley, 30, has been missing since Aug. 31.
On Oct. 2, her mother, Angela, called Ashland police to file a missing person’s report.
“… the last time anyone had seen Shealeah was Aug. 31, 2023, and the last thing she said was she is going to kill herself,” reads the Ashland officer’s report.
Staley’s mother told Ashland police her daughter “is bi-polar and not medicated, and had made suicidal comments before with no means to follow through,” reads the report.
The report also shows Staley had taken her mother’s car on Sept. 1. A day later, the car was found at a house on Roland Avenue in Mansfield and returned.
Mansfield Police Department Lt. Robert Skropits said officers were on a call and planning to make an unrelated arrest on Sunday.
“When they got there, the suspect had already fled. They checked the area, at North Lake,” Skropits said. Officers returned to the area later and the man was back, he sad. “After, he told (officers) there was a body. He must have seen it when he was in the area.”
Skropits said Mansfield police do not believe there was any foul play.
Ball said Tuesday he had Staley’s presumptive identification on Sunday, when authorities found her body in the woods.
“But I don’t go on ‘presumptive.’ We had her ID’d by dental records,” Ball said. “We got lucky with an ID, and she had tattoos that the family was able to give details on.”
Members of the Mercyhurst University, a school based in Erie, Penn., forensic anthropology team assisted with identifying the remains.
Ball said there does not seem to be foul play involved.
“But Mercyhurst will look for trauma around the bones, look for knife wounds, blunt force … gunshots,” he said.