Police: Family friend unwittingly walked through home with decomposing bodies

By Ana Ley

Wednesday, April 2, 2014 | 8:45 p.m.

A family friend helping search for two missing North Las Vegas women over the weekend unwittingly walked next to their decomposing and mutilated corpses while looking for them at home, according to an incident report released today.

The man reportedly told police that he kicked in the home’s back door on Sunday at the behest of distant relatives who were desperate to know where Janice Burden and Natasha Sorrells were.

When he walked in, the man thought a sewer line had broken because a pungent smell filled the house and its floors were covered with a dark fluid. The smell of recently lit incense mingled with the stench, and chunks of torn carpet lay scattered around foam-lined floors. “Bags of stuff” and other clutter filled the living room, according to the report.

The man summoned police to the house in the 6100 block of Stibor Street — near Tropical Parkway and Lamb Boulevard — to report that the place was in disarray, and when officers arrived at the location they realized the residue that covered the home wasn’t excrement. It was blood.

The officers found one of the bodies among the piles of carpet. The other was inside a bath tub — her legs had been sawed off, wrapped in plastic, and stuffed inside a freezer.

By the time police made the grisly discovery, a key suspect in the women’s death was already behind bars on unrelated charges. Darius Davon Sorrells, Burden’s son and Natasha Sorrells’ brother, had been arrested Saturday after encountering police and leading them on a brief chase. Police didn’t know about the deaths until Monday.

Darius Sorrells, 30, had apparently driven to an area Lowe’s on March 28 and purchased earplugs and a chainsaw, apparently the tool he used to dismember the corpse. A receipt he carried at the time of his arrest also showed he went to a Smith’s store at the 2200 block of E. Centennial Parkway to buy food and dust masks.

Nobody had heard from the women since March 26. They were presumably dead when North Las Vegas Police officers knocked on the home’s front door March 30 for a welfare check.

Darius Sorrells has since been charged in connection with the deaths. He’s being held at the Clark County jail on two counts of murder without bail.