Brother was reported missing to police four years ago.

Up until a few years ago, Sumio Suenaga lived in a house in the town of Kasugai, Aichi Prefecture, with his younger sister and brother. However, according to the younger Suenaga siblings, their older brother, who was 66 years old at the time, went missing in 2015.

Perhaps hoping he’d turn up sooner or later, the younger siblings waited until 2016 to reported Sumio’s disappearance to the police, but there still had been no sign of him. Five years seems plenty long enough to wait, and so last weekend Sumio’s younger sister, who’s now 69, decided she’d like to use her older brother’s room, but realized she’d need to clean it up first.

As you might expect for a bedroom that’s gone unattended to for five years, there was plenty of straightening up to do. However, the sister didn’t get too far before discovering an unclothed skeletonized body. “I found something that I think are human bones,” she informed the police, and when officers arrived on the scene they confirmed that the corpse was indeed human. Though they were not initially able to determine the individual’s age or sex, investigators believe there is a high probability that the body is Sumio’s.

As seen in the above video, the Suenaga’s house, which Sumio was the legal owner of, is not particularly large, even by Japanese standards. It’s startling to think that the younger siblings spent years in such close proximity to the remains of their brother, whom they thought was missing, and if by some slim chance the body is not Sumio’s, the situation becomes even more shocking.

Making the whole thing even more puzzling is that when Sumio’s younger siblings initially told the police he was missing, they reportedly said that “he hasn’t come home in over a year,” which would ordinarily imply that they saw him leaving the house, or at least knew that he had left. However, given the siblings’ ages, it’s possible that all three were retired and kept irregular schedules, and that the sister and younger brother simply assumed that if they hadn’t seen Sumio around the house, he must have gone out.

Source: Yahoo! Japan News/Tokai TV via Jin, FNN Prime Online
Top image: Pakutaso
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