This is the fourth time human remains have been found at Lake Mead National Recreation Area since May.
In the latest incident, park rangers received a call Saturday morning about skeletal remains in the Swim Beach area, National Park Service officials said in a statement.
Rangers set up a perimeter on the beach to retrieve the remains with the help of divers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, according to the park service. A medical examiner was also called to determine the cause of death.
At least three different sets have previously been found in the lake, where water levels have fallen to unprecedented lows amid a relentless water crisis in the West. Previous remains discovered, including a body found in a caustic barrel with a gunshot wound, were in an advanced stage of decomposition, making it difficult to extract DNA from them, officials said. It is not clear how long the last discovered remains had been in the lake. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide unit is not currently involved in the investigation, Lt. Jason Johansson told CNN.
However, the police department is leading the investigation into another body found in a barrel at Lake Hemenway Harbor on May 1. The body had an apparent gunshot wound and investigators immediately treated it as a homicide investigation, Johansson previously told CNN.
“Anytime you have a body in a barrel, it’s clear that someone else is involved,” he said.
Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse has since preliminarily ruled the cause and manner of death a homicide by firearm. The remains, named Hemenway Harbor Doe by the coroner’s office, belong to a man who died in the mid-1970s to early 1980s, according to police.
A second set of remains — found May 7 in Calville Bay — are believed to belong to a man who was roughly between 23 and 37 years old, according to Rose.
It is not clear how this person died. The Calville Bay remains are more skeletal than the other two sets, and both still have organ tissue available for examination, Rouse said.
The third set of remains – found on the lake’s beach on July 25 – are only partial and still in the early stages of investigation, according to Rose.
The lake straddles the border of Nevada and Arizona.
While the grim discoveries in the shrinking lake quickly spawned theories of mob involvement, Johansson said those ideas are “mere speculation” at this stage of the investigation.
A spokesman for the National Park Service told CNN that one possible explanation for the remains could be that they belonged to people who had previously drowned in the lake when water levels were high.
At its height in the 1980s, Lake Mead—the nation’s largest man-made reservoir—was 1,225 feet above sea level. But as the mega-drought continues, water levels have plunged this year to the lowest level since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s.
Lake Mead was filled to only 27 percent of capacity as of July 18, 2022, according to NASA. Water levels have dropped so much that, in addition to several bodies, they have uncovered a World War II-era shipwreck, the Park Service announced in early July.
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