Human remains found in Lake Mead as water levels reach record low

Apparent human skeletal remains, including a jaw with the teeth still attached, were found at Lake Mead on Sunday, officials said, as water levels sink to new lows amid a drought and scorching heat in the West.

“On Aug. 16, the Lake Mead Interagency Communications Center received a report of potential human remains at Boulder Beach,” the National Park Service said in a statement. “National Park Service rangers and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department responded to the scene. The incident remains under investigation, and no additional information is available at this time.”

The bones were discovered by a woman and her friend and his daughter on the shoreline of Boulder Beach, which is located on the western side of the lake within Nevada state lines.

“We just went to the lake to, you know, have fun for a little bit. My friend was playing with the rocks in the lake, and then he grabbed the jaw,” Dianelis Molina Cruz told Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS. “And when he looked, he saw the teeth and everything.”

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told KLAS it responded to the location alongside the Clark County Coroner’s Office, but they were not investigating the incident.

The reason the remains were found now can quite likely be chalked up to the concerning drop in water levels at the lake.

“We noticed that it’s very low. The water looks very low compared to where it should be,” Noel De Leon told KLAS on Monday. “As the water goes down, the skeletons come up.”

Water levels have reached historic lows at Lake Mead, which is the largest reservoir in the United States. On Monday, the water level dipped to 1,039.77 feet above sea level, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, well below the previous record low set in July 2022.

At the time the water levels dipped in the summer of 2022, several discoveries of human remains garnered national media attention. In May 2022, boaters spotted a metal barrel that ended up containing human remains. A shirt and belt were still visible on the remains, according to the couple who found it. 

The body was found near Hemenway Harbor, which is just a couple of miles south of Boulder Beach.

The man in the barrel was found to have been shot and was declared a homicide victim. The remains were believed to be from the 1980s, police said. The remains have still not been identified, though police released a composite image of what he may have looked like in November 2023.

The barrel was just one of a number of discoveries of remains in Lake Mead that year. On three dates in July and August 2022, human remains were found in the Boulder Beach area. Those were later identified as the same person, Claude Russell Pensinger, who disappeared in July 1998, according to the Clark County medical examiner. His cause of death was not determined.

Human remains found on May 7, 2022, in Callville Bay, just days after the body was found in the barrel, were later identified as Thomas Erndt, who had drowned in 2002, according to the medical examiner. The remains of another drowning victim, Donald Smith, who was believed to have drowned in 1974, were found in October 2022.