The body was discovered by a passerby near the shoreline off the Neuse River Trail, east of the city, around 11 a.m.

Deputies from the Wake County Sheriff’s Office arrived on the scene at the 5400 block of Allen Drive and are investigating the case as a homicide.

“It’s not every day, it’s not every morning, that you find what could be a person’s body in a suitcase, in a river,” Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker told reporters on Monday afternoon.

Authorities have so far been unable to confirm the identity of the woman and are awaiting the results of an autopsy by the State Medical Examiner’s Office. Baker added that it was “safe to say this was no accident.”

“We’re getting ready to confirm [the woman’s identity],” Baker told reporters at the scene. “I can’t sit here and tell you that’s what’s in there right now. We have not gotten to that point. We have information to believe it.”

The family of missing woman Brittany Samone Smith was also at the scene, ABC11 reported.

Days earlier on February 6, police had requested assistance in locating the 28-year-old, according to a missing person’s report issued by the Wake County Sheriff’s Office.

Smith was last seen in the area on Tuesday around the 200 block of Fox Run Drive and the 7000 block of Hodge Road in Wendell.

“We’re going to work very hard. We’re going to find out who was responsible. I can tell you that,” Baker said. “Because these things just don’t happen. Someone is responsible. If this is, in fact, this young lady that we’ve been looking for all weekend, someone is responsible for that.”

Smith is described as being approximately 4'11" tall and weighing around 115 pounds and is noticeably pregnant.

Newsweek has contacted Wake County Sheriff’s Office for comment.

Similar grisly discoveries have been made in recent months. In December, human remains were found in two suitcases left on the side of a road in Denver.

The discovery was made by Denver Parks and Recreation workers, who were plowing snow from the sidewalk along the Sanderson Gulch Trail in the southwest of the city when they came across the suitcases.

The workers saw what they believed to be body parts inside and alerted authorities. Members of the Denver Police Department’s homicide unit, the medical examiner’s office and the crime lab unit arrived at the scene in the Mar Lee neighborhood.

The remains were later confirmed to be that of a “recently deceased adult white male,” Clark said, citing the Office of the Medical Examiner. The case is being treated as a homicide.

On Sunday, February 7, a body was found floating in a pond at a Colorado golf course.

Officers received a call regarding the grim discovery around 11 a.m. at Hyland Hills Golf Course on Sheridan Boulevard in Westminster.

The body of an adult man was found in the water but did not appear to have any signs of trauma, the Westminster Police Department said.

The cause of death is unknown and police said it was too early in the investigation to determine whether this was criminal, accidental or suicide.