In the latest incident, 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 recover 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 an ongoing water crisis in the West. Earlier remains were discovered, including a body found in a corroded barrel with a gunshot wound. they were in advanced stages of decomposition and thus it is difficult to extract DNA from it, officials said. It is unclear how long the last remains found have been in the lake. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division is not currently handling the investigation, Lt. Jason Johanson told CNN.
The police department, however, is leading the investigation into a different body, one found in the barrel at Lake Hemenway Harbor on May 1. The body bore 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, obviously someone else was involved,” he said.
Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse has since preliminarily ruled the cause and manner of death a homicide by gunshot. The remains, named the Hemenway Harbor Doe by the medical examiner’s office, belonged to someone who died in her mid-70s to early 80s, according to police.
A second set of remains — found May 7 in Calville Bay — is believed to belong to someone who was roughly between 23 and 37 years old, according to Rouse.
It is unclear how this person died. The Calville Bay remains are more skeletal than the other two sets, both of which still have organ tissue available for examination, Rouse said.
A third set of remains — found at the lake’s Swim Beach on July 25 — is only partial and still in the early stages of examination, according to Rouse.
The lake straddles the border of Nevada and Arizona.
While the bleak discoveries at the shrinking lake quickly spawned theories of mob involvement, Johansson said those ideas are “pure speculation” at this point in the investigation.
A National Park Service spokesman told CNN that one possible explanation for the remains could be that they belong to people who previously drowned in the lake when water levels were high.
At its height in the 1980s, Lake Mead — the largest man-made reservoir in the country — was 1,225 feet above sea level. But as the severe drought persists, water levels have fallen this year to their lowest level since the reservoir filled in the 1930s.
Lake Mead was only 27% full on July 18, 2022, according to NASA. Water levels have dropped so far that, in addition to several bodies, they have exposed a sunken World War II-era vessel, the Park Service announced in early July.
