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Prosecutors in the murder trial of a former Doraville police officer played recordings from an alleged stalking victim who called Gwinnett County twice to report the suspect trying to break into her Snellville apartment, but instead of sending help, the operators interrogated the woman and accused her of hiding something.
Miles Bryant, 23, is charged with murder in connection with the 2022 kidnapping and killing of 16-year-old Susana Morales, a junior at Meadowcreek High School who vanished in July 2022 while walking home from a friend’s house.
Her decomposed remains were discovered seven months later in a wooded area near Dacula in February 2023. A week later, Bryant was arrested after investigators found his service weapon near the crime scene, about 20 miles from the girl’s home.
He was fired from his job the same day.
Meanwhile, Elesha Bates took the stand last week as a key witness for the prosecution as she had placed the 911 calls in late 2022 as part of an unrelated stalking case involving the same officer.
Bates, who was mutual friends with Bryant’s ex-girlfriend, submitted Ring camera footage to the Gwinnett County Police Department and the Doraville Police Department in December 2022 after Bryant allegedly showed up unannounced several times at her Snellville apartment and allegedly tried to break in.
Bryant testified that she came home from work one day in March 2022 to find her front door kicked in.
This was after she and Bryant shared pizza one night and caught up on old times because she had known him since fifth grade — adding that she later asked him to leave when he tried to spend the night with her.
A neighbor approached Bates with doorbell camera footage showing the man who had just tried to get inside her apartment while she was at work.
Bates said she was shocked to see that it was her old friend Bryant, and she called police immediately to report him.
Bryant allegedly appeared at her door again in October and twice more in December, and each time, Bates frantically dialed 911 for help as the stalker returned to the scene and was shaking the door knob while the woman was on the call.
The first thing Bates tells dispatchers is, “Somebody is trying to break into my apartment.”
On the tapes, the woman describes being in imminent danger, but instead of treating the matter like an emergency, the operators peppered her relentlessly with trivial questions about her relationship with the suspect and demanded she explain why the man was outside her door.
At the end of the second 911 call, when Bates asks the dispatcher, “Are the cops close?” the female operator answers flatly, “No, ma’am, they are not.”
During both 911 calls, Bates named Bryant as her stalker, but inexplicably, her pleas for immediate help were met with skepticism.
At one point, the operator asks, “What type of relationship do you have with this person?”
This is followed by a barrage of trifling inquiries such as, “How do you know it’s him?” “Were you two in a relationship?” and “Why would he be trying to get into your house?”
A particularly compelling moment demonstrating the lack of urgency in the second 911 call included this exchange:
“OK, what is he — when you say he’s breaking in?”
“My door. He’s trying to get in.”
“So is he like jiggling the door? Is he kicking it?”
“Yes, and pushing up against it.”
“OK,” the dispatcher says, sighing while typing is audible in the background.
Despite just being told that the suspect was trying to kick in the woman’s door, the operator continues with an irrelevant line of questioning.
“Were y’all in a relationship?”
“No. Never. He dated my best friend.”
The operator continued asking irrelevant questions, such as, “Why would he be trying to get into your house?”
“I don’t know,” Bates said.
“I mean, he wouldn’t just randomly come to your house. Had y’all been in argument?”
“No. Never, ever. Please, can you help me?” Bates pleaded desperately.
“That’s what I’m doing, but I need you to stay on the phone with me.”
“No, never in a relationship.”
“OK, so why would he be at your house? Is your friend there?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“OK, is he white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Indian?”
“Black.”
Before the call ends, the woman presses the dispatcher to tell her whether or not help was on the way.
“Is there going to be like, is he going to get arrested tonight? Are they going to be able to do that? Because I …”
But before she could finish, the operator rudely cut her off, saying, “I don’t know, ma’am. Obviously, something’s going on that you’re not telling me, I don’t know why —”
Bates jumped back in and went into the ordeal in more detail.
“No ma’am, there’s nothing going on that I’m not telling you. He was dating my friend from like years ago when we were all kids, I’ve known him since fifth grade. He dated her. They broke up in high school, I hadn’t talked to him since. He wanted to talk to me about them, about possibly getting back together with her. I knew that she still had somewhat feelings and he still liked her so we talked. He came to my house, we had pizza, we talked about her and I sent him home, he tried to stay and sleep, I said no, I sent him home.”
It does not appear that Bates ever filed a formal complaint against the two dispatchers in her case, as she told the court that help never arrived.
“Nobody ever came to the apartment,” she testified.
Bryant lived in the same Norcross apartment complex where Susana Morales had visited her friend on the night she disappeared.
However, police have stated that the killing was random because the two had no connections to each other.
On the night of July 26, 2022, Susana sent a text to her mother to say she was about to leave the Sterling Glen apartment complex, but the girl never made it home.
A missing person report was filed the next day, and investigators quickly learned Susana had shared her location with a friend through an app, which showed the phone going in the opposite direction before it was later found discarded on the side of the road.
Seven months later, Susana’s remains were found on the shoulder of Ga. 316 near Drowning Creek.
Officials were not able to determine the girl’s cause of death due to the body’s advanced stage of decomposition.
A grid search of the area turned up a loaded Glock handgun, which had “been there for a prolonged period,” investigators said at the time.
The gun was registered to Bryant, who reported it stolen the day after the young girl disappeared, claiming it had been stolen from his truck.
Notably, at the time, he “specifically requested that a detective not be assigned to investigate the disappearance of his gun or wallet,” prosecutors said.
Investigators also obtained cellphone data that showed Bryant’s personal and work cellphones were in the same area where the body was found and returned to the area about an hour before he reported his gun stolen.
Based on this, prosecutors allege Bryant went back to the scene where he dumped the body to look for the firearm that he accidentally dropped near the girl’s body.
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