A 3-year-old girl who found her father's body after he was killed in a hail of gunfire in the stairwell of his Philadelphia apartment stayed inside the house with the corpse for 30 hours, police and family said.
The little girl, Aryana, hid in a closet after she saw her 34-year-old father, Armone Stanley, sprawled along the stairs — where he was shot 19 times on Oct. 16, his mother, Eloise Bryant, told NBC Miami.
"My daddy was asleep, and I went down to wake him up," the little girl later told cops and family. "But he wouldn't wake up."
Bryant said her son was carrying his daughter's luggage down the stairs when he was shot.
Stanley was supposed to bring little Aryana back to the airport so she could fly back to her mother's South Florida home.
His daughter climbed down the stairs to the bleeding body, but then went back to the apartment and locked herself in a closet.
When Aryana missed her flight, the family sensed something was wrong and called Stanley's landlord — who went inside the three-family home on N. 49th St. and found the corpse, Bryant said.
Bryant said she couldn't understand how her son's body wasn't found sooner.
"Why didn't nobody walk down the stairs and see him lying there?" she said. "He stayed there all day and all night, and my baby was up there in the closet hungry."
Aryana was later released to her mother, Anna Cassieri.
Family said Stanley had prior arrests that included a bust for being involved in an identity theft ring.
But Bryant said her son was trying to turn his life around before he was killed.
"It hurt me so bad. I still can't stop crying," she said.
No arrests had been made as of Wednesday. Police were still trying to identify a suspect.
- NYDN
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