COVINGTON, Ga. – When Christopher McNabb entered a gas station’s convenient store Sunday evening, he was erratically rambling, answering the question that no one had asked him, and without provocation.
“He just said, ‘I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.’ I said, ‘You know what I’m not from Covington, I don’t know what goes on in Covington. I have nothing to do with it.’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t do it.’ He started screaming and hollering and acting kind of crazy. As he went to the door to walk out, I just picked up the phone and called 911,” Julie Hannah, the clerk on duty inside the gas station off GA 36, said.
Three hours prior, a search party had found the body of an infant in the woods near where his 2-week-old daughter went missing, wrapped inside a blue cloth underneath a log. The infant was located about a quarter of a mile from where the McNabbs lived, Newton County Sheriff's Capt. Keith Crum said.
Tiny Caliyah McNabb’s parents, Christopher and Courtney Bell, reported her missing from their home at Eagle Point Trailer Park in Covington, Ga., Saturday morning.
Bell and Chris said that Caliyah, who was born premature on Sept. 23, weighing in at just 5 lbs., was fine when they fed and changed her at 5 a.m.
But five hours later, she was gone.
Hannah remembered the moment when McNabb walked inside her store the following night. Surveillance video showed McNabb walk into the gas station just before 7:10 p.m.
While helping her customers, one revealed that deputies were looking for McNabb.
She called 911.
McNabb was inside a vehicle when he learned that his daughter’s body had been found, Crum said. He then allegedly jumped out of the vehicle at the intersection of GA 36 and Covington Bypass Road, and fled on foot.
Police captured him and took the father into custody at a car wash nearby the gas station.
As of Monday night, he is being held on a probation violation charge out of Bartow County.
For now, he is the only one named person of interest.
After her daughter was located, Bell was escorted to police headquarters where she gave a statement.
No arrests have been made in connection to the infant’s death.
The Newton County Coroner's Office took Caliyah’s body into custody for an autopsy, which will be conducted at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation headquarters in an effort to determine the cause and manner of her death, including whether or not foul play was involved.
