Ka’Niyah Baker, 13, found dead inside a vacant house after a fire in Columbia. Two teenage girls in South Carolina have been charged in the “vicious” murder of a 13-year-old girl who was found bludgeoned, stabbed, and burned in a vacant house fire.
![[Ka’Niyah Baker, 13, who was reported missing on January 13, was found two days later after a fire at a vacant home]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/20/19/Screenshot-2025-01-20-at-1.35.33%E2%80%AFPM.jpg)
Columbia Police Chief “Skip” Holbrook said at a news conference on Saturday that Ka’Niyah “suffered traumatic injuries to her face and body and had been severely burned,” describing her murder as “heinous.”. The fire department responded after smoke was seen billowing from the house. Once inside, they found the teen’s body on the floor. There was no identification for the teen and police were not able to immediately identify her until the next day.
“The young woman’s description matched a few other women who were reported as runaways or missing,” Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford said on Saturday. “So, the reason that the flyer went out for a missing teen, even though this person already deceased, was in the hopes that she was still alive and this was not her.”.
Holbrook said police “worked with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, DNA lab and the coroner’s office to ultimately determine that our victim was their missing juvenile.”. Rutherford confirmed that the teen’s cause of death was blunt force trauma and that she had been “bludgeoned, stabbed and burned.”.
