ATLANTA () — A 20-year-old maintenance worker who this week pleaded
guilty to molesting and killing a 7-year-old girl was found dead of an
apparent suicide in his prison cell Thursday, according to the Georgia
Department of Corrections.

Ryan Brunn was found unresponsive at 4:15 p.m. at the state prison in
Jackson, spokeswoman Kristen Stancil said. Brunn was taken to a
hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:37 p.m., she said in an
email. She gave no other details about how he died.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents were investigating, said agency
spokesman John Bankhead. An autopsy will likely be done Friday at the
agency's medical examiner's office in Decatur, he said.

Brunn pleaded guilty on Tuesday to Jorelys Rivera's Dec. 2 killing at
a north Georgia apartment complex where she lived and he had worked
for about a month.

The girl was reported missing after she left the complex's playground
to retrieve sodas at her apartment for her friends. Brunn described in
detail to the court how he lured the girl into a vacant apartment and
sexually assaulted her. He said he was afraid she would tell her
parents so he "cut her." When she didn't die right away, he beat and
stabbed her.

Then he put her body in a garbage bag and dumped it in a trash
compactor at the complex where it was found.

After his guilty plea, a judge immediately sentenced him to life in
prison without parole. Brunn also apologized to the girl's family
members, who sobbed in the front row of the courtroom when he
graphically described how he killed her.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the girl's mother
expressed relief Thursday.

"This is the kind of justice that I was expecting for him for all the
damage that he made to my little daughter," Jocelyn Rivera said. "Now,
I can say that I feel satisfied."

The news of Brunn's death came the same day that Canton officials
announced that its police Chief Jeff Lance had resigned after a
scathing report found he took a "laid back" approach to the search for
Rivera.

Brunn's defense attorney, David Cannon, did not immediately return
calls seeking comment. Cherokee County District Attorney Garry Moss
also did not immediately return calls.

Lance stepped down after the 17-page review revealed his department of
about 50 officers violated several of its own policies and made many
mistakes in the search for Rivera, said city manager Scott Wood.

A call to Lance for comment was not immediately returned.

The inquiry said there was little doubt that Rivera was already dead
by the time Canton police received the missing child report. But it
said if another such report were handled in the same manner, police
"may indeed miss an opportunity to save a victim's life."

The review found that the officer who responded to the initial call
treated the case as a routine one that "would be solved in the same
manner as dozens of other such cases that the agency had handled in
2011."

Local officers arriving to search for Rivera failed to activate their
dash-board cameras to record the scene, failed to immediately
determine if any sexual predators lived or worked nearby, and didn't
report her case to a national registry until almost a day after she
went missing, the report said.

The report said Lance didn't arrive at the apartment complex in the
town of about 23,000 until around 10:15 a.m. the next morning — about
17 hours after the child was last seen. When he did arrive, it said he
was talking to several other officers about the "Georgia game" and
eventually turned the TV to a football game.

"Personnel present at the scene frequently characterized the chief's
level of concern as 'laid back,'" the report said.

Lance failed to launch a separate criminal investigation or heed
advice to process Rivera's home as a crime scene, the report said.

Other problems with the investigation surfaced earlier. A Cherokee
County deputy who failed to immediately report seeing drops of blood
in an apartment during the search for the girl was earlier ordered to
undergo additional training. That was not included in the latest
report.

Wood, the city manager, said the review should answer questions that
were raised about the department's policies and procedures.

"Although sadly the family must still deal with the heartache and loss
of this young child, from a legal perspective the matter has now been
fully concluded," he said in a statement.