A teen who disturbingly stumbled upon human remains in a quaint Long Island park may have helped solve a year-long missing persons case.
A local high school track team was running on trails through Plandome Pond Park in Manhasset around 5:45 p.m. on Thursday when one runner, an Eagle Scout, spotted skeletal remains in the brush, according to the Nassau County Police Department and NBC New York.
“They were running adjacent to the train tracks, and they were coming through to the park. He discovered the remains,” Plandome Heights Mayor Kenneth Riscica told the outlet.
Cops are now probing whether the remains belong to Shi Hua Xu, a 79-year-old grandmother who vanished from her home in the neighboring town of Great Neck in December 2025.
Xu, who suffers from dementia, frequently took strolls around the neighborhood and was spotted walking in Great Neck before she was never seen again.
She was not wearing her tracker on the day she disappeared, and her family has been desperately searching for her ever since.
“It is a female. We are looking to positively identify the body by the end of the day. We don’t believe it to be criminal in nature,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder told the outlet.
The missing grandmother’s family has positively identified a piece of clothing recovered at the scene as belonging to Xu, according to the report.
The medical examiner’s office is awaiting positive identification from DNA testing to confirm whether the body was Xu.
Despite the grim discovery, the teen who found the remains told detectives he was “doing fine” and was happy to bring a family some closure.
“When the detectives asked him how he was doing, his response was ‘I’m doing fine. I only hope this brings closure to a family that lost someone’,” Riscica said.
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