Black family chaos: A search for a missing 17-month-old girl ended tragically after her body was recovered beneath a toppled pile of laundry inside her grandmother's closet

The black family of little Zyia Turner are calling her death an accident after cadaver dogs unearthed her body hours after an Amber Alert was issued throughout their Detroit community. "We were hoping, just hoping someone had took her," Ziya’s grandmother Bridget Elam said behind tears. "We never thought she was in the house right up under our nose. It didn’t cross our minds." It was in a dishevelled bedroom of Elam’s home, packed with thrown clothes and other variously sprawled items, that her granddaughter was found by police. Her uncle who was supposedly watching her at the time, as well as several other children, told police that he suspected she had wandered away. Elam says that it was 3.46pm when she got the phone call from her son asking if she knew where Zyia was. "What do you mean you can't find her?" Elam recalled asking her son. The uncle told police that he temporarily left the children alone to go to his bedroom before returning to find Zyia missing. He reported the other children saying that they hadn’t seen where she could have gone. "The last I saw her, she was sitting on the dining room floor eating cereal. That's when everything went to a panic," Elam recalled. The girl's father, 25-year-old Emmanuel Turner, said he rushed straight to the house to help their search efforts. Worried the girl had left the property, the family made and distributed fliers throughout their neighborhood after calling police and issuing an Amber Alert. Receiving the tragic news early the next morning, for Elam, the hardest part she says is now knowing that the toddler was in her house the entire time. "My grandkids... they’re blaming themselves, like we didn’t search the area," she said. "But you can’t put that on you. It was a bad accident. It was a very bad accident that we just have to deal with." While police said that the family had been fully cooperating in the investigation the girl's uncle has been placed under arrest. The child's cause of death has not been released while an autopsy has been completed while pending a toxicology screening. The case remains under investigation and Detroit police homicide investigators are still questioning those involved. The youngest of three, Zyia had a two and six-year-old brother.