CHICAGO » On a recent chilly afternoon, Karina Olmedo knelt and placed a stuffed panda on her brother’s grave. He would have liked it, she thought, and his birthday was days away.

She brushed away some leaves, uncovering an inscription on the marble stone that read, “Atcel Olmedo. Son. Unknown. But not forgotten.”

He died, mysteriously, before his third birthday. It was one decade ago that his body was found, hidden inside a drawstring canvas laundry bag, discarded in a roadside thicket in DuPage County.

The investigation into what happened to the child, known as “DuPage Johnny Doe,” has received widespread media attention ever since as police chased a whirlwind of leads and dead ends to learn his identity and figure out how he died. The answer to the latter question remains elusive.

But, it was his big sister who years later gave Atcel back his name. On her 14th birthday, covered in bruises, Karina Olmedo told her eighth-grade teacher that her stepfather beat her and two of her five younger siblings “almost every other day,” according to records.

One week later, while in protective custody, she found the courage to ask police to find a seventh child in the family — her brother Atcel — who was long missing.

Olmedo said her mother and stepfather forbade the children from speaking his name. If they did, she said, they were punished.

Now 21, she is no longer afraid. In a series of Chicago Tribune interviews, Olmedo for the first time spoke publicly about Atcel and the dark family secret that she refused to keep. She suffered years of childhood abuse and neglect in Mexico and, later, in Cicero after her mother and stepfather moved the family to the United States.

Her memories are documented in a trove of child welfare reports and court and law enforcement records obtained by the Tribune in one of the Chicago suburbs’ most haunting mysteries. She not only shed light on the boy’s short life and death, but the sister also revealed her own traumatic history.

Karina Olmedo’s story, though, is one of survival.

Years of counseling helped her learn to cope with so much loss and hurt. But, Olmedo said, her desire to be a positive role model for her brothers and sisters is what sustains her through the most difficult times.

“They are my everything,” she said.

Her siblings, ages 19 to 8, are safe and living together in the Chicago area under the last name of a couple who legally adopted them.

Olmedo chose to remain in foster care, at times living with her siblings. She is now on her own. She kept her real name with the hope her mother might find her someday. Her mother and stepfather vanished in 2008 after the children were placed in protective custody and Olmedo began asking about Atcel.

Authorities said they believe the couple fled to the Mexico City area, where the family is from.

Both are wanted on various warrants. Just months after he fled, the stepfather was named in a federal indictment for his alleged role in a counterfeit identification ring in the Little Village neighborhood. He has a history of violence, court records show.

The Tribune is not naming the couple because they have not been charged with any wrongdoing related to Atcel’s death, but authorities have long sought them for questioning.

Karina Olmedo said she knew the last time she saw her mother something was amiss. The woman gave her a photo of Our Lady of Guadalupe and made her daughter make a promise.

“She was crying and saying, ‘Promise me you’ll always remember I love you,’” Olmedo said. “I think she was saying goodbye.”

The daughter can’t help but still love her mother, she said, though the woman never intervened to stop the violence. But, Olmedo said, her sense of duty and love for Atcel is just as powerful. She urged authorities to continue their search for her mother and stepfather.

“He was my brother,” she said. “I want there to be justice for him.”

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Karina Olmedo was born in Mexico City. She was the first child for her mother, who was just 15 and ill-prepared to raise children, Olmedo said.

The woman had six more kids over the next 13 years with three men, including the girl’s stepfather. Atcel was born in the middle, Nov. 5, 2002, when the family still lived in Mexico.

Olmedo remembered her brother had a big smile and liked to play in the park. She laughed when talking about the time she caught the toddler, though typically obedient, pretending to eat his food — a traditional Mexican dish made with cactus plant that he disliked.

She later found much of the meal on the floor.

Olmedo said she tried to look after her siblings, especially after their mother left them with relatives in 2003 while the couple went to live in the United States. Atcel was an infant. Olmedo was gone a lot, she said, to avoid the turmoil in the home and earn money. At 8, she was washing neighbors’ dishes and baby-sitting.

And so she was not home the day her mother sent someone to pick up Atcel and another sibling to join her in the U.S. Olmedo recalls Atcel by then walked and said some words, so it likely was between 2004 and early 2005 that she last saw him alive.

“I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye,” she said.

By late 2005, her mother and stepfather came back to Mexico but without Atcel. Olmedo said the children were told he went to live with his biological father elsewhere in Mexico.

Meanwhile, the recent discovery of a boy’s body in DuPage County stymied police. His family never reported him missing. No one ever came forward to claim him.

In a statement Olmedo later made to authorities, her stepfather’s mother in Mexico told her in early 2006 that the couple “killed Atcel, put him in a bag and dumped him,” according to a federal document.

Olmedo confirmed the police account, but she said at the time she didn’t necessarily believe the older woman, who hated her mother, she said. She grew more suspicious as time went on.

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On Oct. 8, 2005, an overcast afternoon, Ted Bruder was walking his dog in a grassy, isolated area of Naperville Township when the white shepherd took off running.

Bruder caught up to his dog, Buddy, near a creek bed in a steep embankment off the roadway. The dog had sniffed out a blue canvas laundry bag. The Bolingbrook man called 911 after he untied the discarded bag and discovered the remains of a young boy.

“It’s hard to imagine how someone could do that to another human being, especially a little baby,” said Bruder, a retired carpenter.

The boy was clad in a navy blue shirt and pants, size 2T. He had black hair, weighed 38.5 pounds, was about 3 feet tall and had large brown eyes.

He was dumped months earlier, authorities theorized. His remains were badly decomposed, and signs of trauma and a cause of death were not found.

The case still haunts DuPage County sheriff investigators, who back then issued several sketches of what the boy might have looked like. There were nationwide alerts, and fliers were posted inside local schools, businesses and government buildings.

His case aired on “America’s Most Wanted” and “Without a Trace.” The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also became involved. There were hundreds of leads. Forensic scientists extracted DNA, and experts in everything from bones to dentistry to bugs were hired to lend their expertise.

Finally, two years later, the unidentified boy was buried in a donated grave in a Wheaton cemetery. More than 150 mourners attended the solemn service, including the man who found him.

Bruder said he thinks about the boy “all the time,” especially while walking his dog. A few weeks ago, Bruder said a final goodbye to his ailing dog and old friend after 15 years of companionship.

———

Olmedo’s mother and stepfather came back to the United States illegally, Olmedo said, with the five children in 2006. They settled in Cicero, and another child was born the following February.

One month earlier, in January 2007, Olmedo complained at school that her stepfather beat her. But, she said, her mother forced her to later say she lied. The next time, though, there was physical evidence.

It was April 14, 2008, her 14th birthday. Olmedo said her stepfather made her get out of bed early to clean the home before school. He had beaten her with a belt the night before.

Later that morning, friend Arleth Tarin said she saw her crying. Tarin said Olmedo rarely took off her jacket or dressed during gym for fear someone would notice her bruises.

“I just thought this has to stop,” said Tarin, 22. “It hurt me to see Karina like that. I think of her like a sister.”

With Tarin’s prodding, the girls approached their eighth-grade teacher at Unity Junior High School. The school contacted the state’s child abuse hotline.

The teen detailed how her stepfather kicked her with his steel work boots, slapped and whipped her with a belt “almost every other day.” She said he also beat two other siblings, sometimes drawing blood. She said the three youngest, which were his biological children, were spared.

“He would say, ‘I’m going to kill you and make it look like an accident,’” she said.

Olmedo said her mother didn’t hit them, but she also did not intervene and at times encouraged the violence. She said her stepfather’s anger toward one sibling in particular was increasingly brutal, and as the oldest child, she could not remain silent.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services placed all six kids in protective custody. Doctors found signs of abuse, and another sibling also admitted being beaten, according to records.

Days later, Olmedo asked authorities about Atcel.

“I was not planning to say that, but I wanted to know where my brother was,” Olmedo said. “I didn’t think he was dead.”

Police in Cicero realized her description of Atcel and the timing of his disappearance matched the DuPage Johnny Doe case. They alerted the sheriff’s office. A short time later, a comparison of DNA between the boy’s remains and one of Olmedo’s siblings matched.

It was the same sibling targeted by the stepfather with increasing violence, Olmedo said. The sibling was the only one of the children with Atcel in the United States before his 2005 disappearance.

She said her sibling, about 5 when Atcel disappeared, later told her their stepfather hit them. Her sibling does not know what happened to Atcel, Olmedo said, but remembers seeing Atcel for the last time.

They were all in the car. The sibling believed Atcel was sleeping. He never woke up during the ride. The sibling did not know where they went but, after they arrived, a friend of the stepfather drove off with Atcel still in the back seat.

The sibling also remembered, according to Olmedo, seeing her mother and stepfather put all of the boy’s clothing into a bag.

———

Authorities investigating the child abuse allegations interviewed the parents, including on May 6, 2008.

The mother declined to answer questions about Atcel, according to a report of her interview. She called Karina her “doll.”

Olmedo’s stepfather denied the abuse allegations and said her oldest brother had hit her. Officials described the man as cooperative and friendly. “We are in your hands,” he said, according to state child welfare records.

Police had arrested Olmedo’s stepfather more than a dozen times under his various aliases from 2000 to 2007 for battery, domestic battery, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, selling fraudulent IDs, and traffic offenses, according to court records in DuPage and Cook counties. He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of identity fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Weeks after the May 2008 interviews, and after Olmedo’s mother bonded out on a misdemeanor charge alleging she endangered her children’s lives for not intervening, the couple vanished.

The DuPage County sheriff’s office said the investigation into Atcel’s death remains “ongoing and open,” but authorities declined to answer specific questions.

The case presents many legal challenges, according to experts in international criminal law, because both the mother and stepfather are Mexican citizens. Their extradition is unlikely without a murder charge and, even if filed, Mexican officials may determine there is not enough evidence and release them.

A few years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice, at DuPage County’s request, sought legal assistance from Mexican authorities to locate and interview the couple, the stepfather’s mother and Atcel’s birth certificate.

The request listed “first-degree murder, reckless homicide and unlawful removal of human remains” as possible offenses, according to the document.

The couple, though, was not found, and their whereabouts remain unknown, according to authorities.

The last time Olmedo saw her mother during a weekly supervised visit at a Chicago social service agency the tearful woman acted as if she was saying goodbye, the daughter said. She still wears a gold ring on her left hand that is similar to the one her mother usually wore. The daughter said she has not seen or heard from her mother since but she suspects the stepfather will return, if he hasn’t already.

“He can’t live without money,” she said, a nod to the counterfeit charges. “I know he’s missing it. He’ll always come back here to get it.”

———

Olmedo’s violent childhood, teenage depression and the state’s efforts to help her overcome it all are chronicled in hundreds of pages that make up her Cook County child protection court file. In reports, social workers wrote down words such as “resilient,” “smart,” “optimistic,” and “warm and caring” to describe her.

“She understood the importance of getting a diploma,” Tito Rodriguez, a mentor, told the Tribune. “She would always say, ‘I need to be an example for my brothers and sisters,’ even when she was doubting herself. ‘They need to know I’m not a quitter, or they’ll think they can quit too.’”

In 2012, Olmedo graduated from Antonia Pantoja High School in Chicago and attended a city college for a short time. She hopes to return and is interested in nursing, cosmetology and maybe being a foster parent later in life to help a needy child.

For now, though, she works full time cleaning planes at O’Hare International Airport. She is not unlike other young adults in that she loves music, going to the movies and concerts, hanging out on the city’s lakefront or shopping with friends. She dotes on her two small dogs.

“I’m happy,” she said. “I don’t cry anymore. I have no more tears left.”

Time has healed some of Olmedo’s wounds, she said. She wants to help police, but, she admits, she does not want her mother to go to prison.

She also wants the community to know Atcel was loved. She does not have a photo of him, but after reviewing the law enforcement sketches, she identified one by the national missing children center as the most accurate.

Olmedo said she and her siblings did not know Atcel was dead until it was reported in the news in February 2011. That next day, she said, the woman who adopted her siblings took them all to his then unmarked grave. His name was added later.

She returned again for the first time last month, days before what would have been his 13th birthday. His sister placed the stuffed animal near the marker. She noticed his name was spelled differently than she knew it to be. The Spanish spelling is Atzel, she said. However, government records in the U.S. spell it Atcel.

After a few moments of silence, while kneeling in grass wet with fall rain, she stood up to leave but instead paused. Later, when asked to share her thoughts, Olmedo said she told her brother she was sorry she was not home that day in Mexico when he was taken to the U.S.

She wishes she could have protected him.

“I love you,” she said to him. “You will always be in my heart, and I will forget you never.”