Florida Teens Found Dead, Naked And Hogtied On Road

Two Florida teenagers were found dead, naked and tied up on the side of a Jacksonville road early Thursday morning, police said.

The bodies were found by two men driving down a wooded road in North Jacksonville a little after 1 a.m., First Coast News reported. Their hands and feet were bound and they were lying in a pool of blood on the grass, the witnesses said.

By Thursday afternoon, police identified the victims as 18-year-old Tjhisha Monique Ball and 19-year-old Angelia Ella Mangum. Police have not disclosed how the teens died and they are investigating the case as a double murder.

Jason Brown, one of the men who found the girls, described the harrowing scene he came across while driving home from visiting a friend.

"At first I thought it was one, and then I did a U-turn to see if it was a dead animal. That's when we saw that it was one laying on top of another that looked like they were tossed from the overpass," Brown told WFOX-TV.

"They were hogtied like wild animals," he said.

Investigators are working with a missing persons unit to determine if the teens, both from Tampa, were reported missing, according to First Coast News.

Jerlean Moore, Ball's mother, said her daughter was a dancer and regularly traveled back and forth between Tampa and Jacksonville, the Tampa Bay Times reported. It is not clear who Ball was staying with in Jacksonville.

The newspaper's attempts to reach Mangum's relatives were unsuccessful. Moore said Mangum and her daughter were like "two peas in a pod."

Moore said she feared for her daughter's safety given what she did for a living.

"You still worry because of the style of work they do," she told the Tampa Bay Times. "You still worry because it's someone you love."