Atlanta -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Ryan Brunn , the man who this week was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to murdering a Georgia girl , apparently killed himself in his prison cell Thursday , a corrections spokeswoman said . Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman Kristen Stancil said that Brunn was found unresponsive at 4:15 p.m. in his cell at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson . Brunn was pronounced dead at a hospital at 5:37 p.m. due to an apparent suicide , she said . The case since has been referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation , according to Stancil . Brunn had entered a guilty plea Tuesday at a hearing in a Cherokee County courthouse , during which he described in detail how he enticed , molested and killed 7-year-old Jorelys Rivera . He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole , avoiding a potential death sentence by lethal injection . The girl 's father , Ricardo Galarza , told CNN en Espanol that news of Brunn 's death partly made him `` feel good but , on the other hand , it does n't because my daughter will never be with me again . '' Galarza said that he felt that a lifetime of Brunn being watched after , `` eating three times a day -LRB- and -RRB- sleeping with air conditioning '' while in prison was not enough . `` What I wanted was for them to put him in the electric chair and burn him , '' the father said . `` I would have taken him there myself and prepared it , so he would burn . '' Jorelys ' mangled body was found in a trash compactor three days after she went missing on December 2 from an apartment complex in Canton , about 40 miles north of Atlanta . According to the indictment , Jorelys was severely beaten and stabbed repeatedly in the face , neck and chest . Brunn , 20 , who worked as a maintenance man at the same apartment complex , was arrested on December 7 and charged with the crime . Last week , Brunn was indicted on 13 counts including murder , aggravated assault , cruelty to children , aggravated child molestation , enticing a child for indecent purposes , false imprisonment , abandonment of a dead body , making a false statement and sexual exploitation of children . He told the court Tuesday that he had never talked to Jorelys before the day of her murder . He said he devised a plan after he found one of her skates . Brunn took a picture of the skate and approached her with it , asking if the skate was hers . She said yes , and Brunn promised to take her to it . Instead , he took her to an empty apartment and instructed Jorelys to pull down her pants . He then put tape over her face and cut her throat with a razor . At this point , she was still alive , he told the court . He said that he then took Jorelys to the bathroom and beat her to death with the skate . He said he did not have sex with the girl . Increasingly , Brunn told the court , he grew concerned about what he had done . So he took a receipt , wrote on the back of it , `` She is in the trash can , '' and taped it to the compactor . He admitted lying to investigators who had questioned him about the case . Brunn said he knew right from wrong , adding he `` never had an idea of killing a child in my life . '' `` I 'd like to apologize for everything I 've done , and I do deserve everything that you 're about to give me , '' he said in court .