The Polk County Sheriff’s Office is working to identify the remains found by a group of children in a pasture northeast of Lakeland.
Children playing in a wooded area discovered a skull and bones the evening of May 28, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference held near the site the next day. After running home, one of the children convinced a parent to investigate, leading to a call to the Sheriff’s Office, Judd said.
Investigators found part of a skull, jaw bones and a few vertebrae, Judd said. Preliminary analysis suggested the remains belonged to a man in his 30s or 40s, but that has not been conclusively confirmed, Judd said.
The remains do not appear related to any of three prominent missing persons from Polk County, Judd said: Tonya Whipp, Ethan Fussell or Savannah Mahoney.
Whipp, an Auburndale resident, was reported missing in June 2023. Fussell was last seen in North Lakeland in May 2024. He is presumed dead, and the Polk Sheriff’s Office has arrested two men on murder charges and two others on lesser charges.
Mahoney, then 22, was last seen in the Skyview Drive area of Lakeland in February 2022.
The remains would have been more decomposed if the body belonged to any of those three, Judd said.
The remains were found above the ground at the edge of a pasture near Fish Hatchery Road and Morgan Combee Road. The area is near Saddle Creek Park and Aldine Combee Park, about a mile north of Memorial Boulevard.
The search for additional remains resumed the morning of May 29, Judd said. The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office offered the use of a cadaver dog, but it had not discovered any additional remains as of midday on May 29, he said.
An autopsy found no evidence of damage to the skull, Judd said.
“We can tell by the state of the skull that the person hasn’t been there a real long time,” he said.
A study of the remains determined that the person had received extensive dental work, including fillings and crowns, Judd said. That condition of the teeth made it less likely the person had been homeless at the time of death, he said.
Known homeless camps are found within about a half mile of the site, Judd said.
The fact that only a small part of the skeleton was found does not necessarily suggest foul play, Judd said. Evidence suggested that an animal might have dragged the skull and other bones into the pasture, he said.
Judd said he has no reason to expect that searches will find more than one set of remains.
The 20-acre property includes sections with dense forest, making the search of those areas challenging, Judd said.
“Our crime scene and homicide team arrived last night (May 28),” Judd said. “Today, we have support by our (agriculture) team. It’s hot. It’s damp, and there’s a lot of woods. We are searching for the rest of the body, and that search will go on until we find the rest.”
The sheriff encouraged local residents with relatives they have not seen or heard from in months to contact his office.
“If you have an uncle or an aunt or a person that strays, and ‘I haven’t seen him in a while, and I don’t know what happened, and usually they show up every six months or so, or every three months, or every month,’ and they haven’t — let us know, because obviously we’re taking DNA samples, and it would be easier to track back,” Judd said.
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Polk sheriff says there’s no ID yet on human bones found in pasture
Reporting by Gary White, Lakeland Ledger / The Ledger
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