Mom of Missing Girl Arrested After Family Concern Leads Police to Charred Remains In Apartment

27-year-old Alexus Tanielle Nelson was booked on charges of attempting to influence a public servant, child abuse resulting in death, tampering with a deceased human body and tampering with physical evidence.

The investigation into Nelson started last Tuesday, after police in Aurora, Colorado received a 9-1-1 call from the suspect's mother, who requested a welfare check after Alexus allegedly made "concerning statements" indicating she had given her daughter Maha Li Hobbs up for adoption. Specifically, Nelson's mother said she received a text reading, "My rent has gone up again so rehoming and I've been looking at fostering."

According to police, they responded to Nelson's apartment, where she said she had given up custody of her daughter via a "closed adoption," claiming to have used the Adoptions with Love agency to facilitate the process. The agency, however, had no records of Nelson on file, while police found no evidence of any adoption in the Colorado courts either.

Cops, according to the arrest affidavit via Law&Crime, then confronted Nelson, who they say "changed her story" to say Adoptions with Love only suggested other agencies to her ... before naming a woman who supposedly facilitated her daughter's adoption to an "unidentified couple." Nelson, however, had no documentation, claiming she threw everything away because she didn't want her family to try and find her daughter. She then allegedly gave her phone to police to try and find emails to the woman in question, but they found none and seized the phone.

After getting a search warrant for Nelson's phone, they found Google searches for "Can you overdose from melatonin? and "Can you overdose from Xanax?", as well as videos of the child in which she "appeared to be saying goodbye to family." One of those videos, from May 3, was the last time anyone in Nelson's family saw the girl alive.

As police searched the apartment building, a maintenance worker told cops he did a "routine bi-annual inspection" of Nelson's unit on May 5 and found the door to Maha's bedroom was tied with a string to the bathroom door, "preventing it from opening." While in the unit, he claimed Nelson also "began yelling at him via a baby monitor to leave," which he did. During their initial search -- allegedly done with Nelson's permission -- cops noticed a "lack of any children's items" in the apartment, as well as "various stains of unknown origin" in the child's "completely empty" room.

Aurora PD obtained a search warrant for the residence on Wednesday and upon opening a utility closet in the unit filled with children's items smelled "the distinct odor of decomposing flesh." A large shopping bag hidden in the closet contained a smaller plastic bag filled with "what appeared to be charred human remains." Bone fragments and bone from either a rib or shoulder blade were also found in the fireplace. The Coroner's Office later confirmed the remains are human, though have not positively identified them as belonging to Maha.

"We are very confident that this is our victim," Aurora Police Chief Art Acevedo said during a press conference last Thursday, however. "There’s a high probability that murder charges will end up being filed," he added.

According to the affidavit, police believe Nelson placed her daughter in a situation "that resulted in her death," before she "then attempted to hinder the resulting investigation by lying about an adoption and burning the remains."

The suspect's mother said Nelson kept her pregnancy with the child a secret, sharing a text message in which her daughter said she initially planned to put her up for adoption before deciding the girl was "un-give-up-able." The girl's father, meanwhile, said he hasn't had contact with Nelson or his daughter in two years.

Nelson is being held on $100,000 bond at the Arapahoe County Detention Center.