More than a year after the remains of a man who died from a gunshot wound were found in a barrel at Lake Mead, the FBI has created a composite model of his face to try and identify him.
The barrel containing the man’s body was uncovered after water levels dropped at the lake in Nevada on May 1, 2022.
The man in the barrel was one of four dead people found at Lake Mead last year, Clark County officials said in a release Wednesday. The other three people have since been identified using DNA analysis and, for two of them, reports from the victims’ drownings.
Subsequent examination of the barrel decedent’s remains found that, judging by his clothes and shoes, the man died in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Ray Spencer told The New York Times in May.
Now officials hope to use the composite to solicit DNA from someone bearing a resemblance, in the hopes of building a profile that could identify the man in the barrel. Testing of the remains couldn’t provide a match.
“Our hope is to put the composite out there and see if we can get any good matches. … As good as a DNA profile is, it’s only as good as what you have to compare it to. So obviously the next steps would be to get it out to the community in hopes that we have some good links to individuals that could be considered for testing,” Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse told local Fox afficiate KVVU-TV.
