Remains found Friday in submerged car are a turtle, not human

By Ari Hait

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    WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (WPBF) — West Palm Beach police gave a surprising update Tuesday about remains found inside a car that had been submerged in a lake for decades.

Investigators said the remains aren’t human, as many suspected.

Instead, an anthropologist has identified them as turtle remains.

It was a disappointing announcement for Dave Yurkovich, the diver who found the remains Friday afternoon.

Yurkovich was working with two volunteer groups: Adventures with Purpose and Sunshine State Sonar.

Together, they were searching for a man who had vanished with his vehicle in the 1970s.

They believed his car may have wound up in a lake just west of Interstate 95, just south of 45th Street in West Palm Beach.

They were only in the water a short time when Sonar identified a vehicle about 35 feet offshore.

“Every time they tell us there’s a vehicle, your heart’s beating faster,” Yurkovich said. “You really are entering the world of the unknown.”

Yurkovich said this case was more unknown than most because visibility under the water was near zero.

“The first 20, 30 seconds of being down there, everything I was doing was by touch,” Yurkovich said.

Yurkovich said he used his hands to determine the car under the water was not the car they had been looking for.

He said it was the wrong make and model.

He could also tell it was badly damaged.

“The windows were broken out, which would be extremely indicative of a rollover prior to it going into the water,” Yurkovich said.

After more searching, Yurkovich said he recovered the keys to the car and what he believed to be human remains, though it was hard to tell in the cloudy water.

“I was holding my light right here. I pulled it up in my left hand,” he said. “Even from a two inch distance, I still couldn’t tell what I was looking at.”

All weekend, Yurkovich and the other volunteers believed they may be one step closer to having located a missing person.

Until he heard the police had identified the remains as not human, Yurkovich said he had been looking forward to bringing closure to a family.

“Now you can finally say, ‘OK, I know they’re truly at peace, and now I can put them to rest,’” he said. “And for them, they can begin the grieving and the healing process.”

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