A dead body was discovered inside a shopping cart outside a grocery store in California.

The body, wrapped in a sheet, dumped inside a shopping cart, was discovered on Sunday afternoon, March 12.

The horrifying discovery was made just after 4 p.m. outside the Food Maxx store on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway in Chico.

A customer who had just finished shopping at the store noticed what appeared to be a corpse in the shopping cart. A bystander dialed 911.

Responding officers discovered the shopping cart near the front of the grocery store, and further examination of the contents revealed a man’s decomposing body wrapped in a white plastic sheet.

According to the Chico Police Department, the man was pronounced dead at the scene and his body was taken to the coroner’s office.

The victim, later identified as 61-year-old Daniel Niles, had visible injuries, indicating a struggle prior to his death, according to police. Police began to investigate the man’s death as a homicide.

Detective Lieutenant Brian Miller of the Chico Police Department told a local news station that the body had likely been inside the cart and in front of the store for several days before it was discovered and somehow nobody noticed it or bothered to call the police.

Miller also told the outlet that police had already viewed surveillance footage from the store, which showed a possible suspect associated with the cause of death.

According to the detective, they saw some movement in the surveillance footage and a suspect moving the shopping cart on the sidewalk.

On Monday, investigators returned to the scene and were seen taking samples of what they called suspicious stains on the ground. They collected the samples by following the tracks of the shopping cart’s movement, as seen in the video.

Authorities later revealed that video surveillance showed that the shopping cart had originally been moved to a location near the bathroom, out-of-sight from the entrance to the store, but an employee had moved the shopping cart closer to entrance, allegedly without alerting authorities about the body. The corporate office of the market refused to release the video and police obtained it with a search warrant. 

The Butte County District Attorney’s Office believe that Timothy Wayne Wiechert, 48, of Chico killed Niles. 

Wiechert is also facing an attempted murder charge in another incident. He was charged last week with the attempted strangulation murder of a 28-year-old woman on the same morning Niles was found in the shopping cart. 

A neighbor assisted the woman and she was treated and released from the hospital two days later. Wiechert suffered a broken shoulder blade during the incident and was later booked into jail and arrested. 

District Attorney Mike Ramsey said if Wiechert is convicted of the attempted murder of the woman, and the murder of Niles, he faces two life terms in prison.