A teenager may have cracked an almost year-long missing persons case after a disturbing discovery was made at a Long Island park.<\/p>\n
A local high school track team was running the trails behind Plandome Pond Park in Manhasset around 5:45 p.m. Thursday when one of the members, an Eagle Scout, noticed something unusual: He spotted human remains in the brush.<\/p>\n
“The local track team was up there and saw what looked like human remains,” said Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder. <\/p>\n
It was a disturbing find at what is known as a quaint place for residents to sit and enjoy nature.<\/p>\n
“They were running adjacent to the train tracks and they were coming through to the park. He discovered the remains,” said Plandome Heights Mayor Kenneth Riscica, who spoke to the teen about what he saw.<\/p>\n
Riscica was told the remains were found in the brush, between the train tracks and the park \u2014 not a place where someone would normally walk or run.<\/p>\n
Police believe the grisly find could help solve a missing persons case that originated four miles away from the park almost a year ago.<\/p>\n
“It is a female. We are looking to positively identify the body by the end of the day. We don\u2019t believe it to be criminal in nature,” said Ryder.<\/p>\n
Nassau police were investigating whether the remains were of Shi Hua Xu, a 79-year-old mother and grandmother who left her home in Great Neck in Dec. 2025, never to be seen again.<\/p>\n
Xu, who suffers from dementia, was known to take long walks in the neighborhood, and had been seen walking in Great Neck on several security cameras. She did not have her tracker on the day she disappeared. Her family and an entire neighborhood banded together to search for her.<\/p>\n
“Now a family who may have been missing someone for a year will finally have some closure,” said North Hempstead Supervisor Jennifer Desena.<\/p>\n
Xu\u2019s family said Nassau detectives and the medical examiner’s office have contacted them. They were awaiting positive identification from DNA testing before commenting further. However, the family said police showed them a piece of clothing recovered from the scene, which they identified as belonging to Xu.<\/p>\n
As for the teen who made the discovery, Mayor Riscica said “when the detectives asked him how he was doing, his response was ‘I\u2019m doing fine. I only hope this brings closure to a family that lost someone.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenager may have cracked an almost year-long missing persons case after a disturbing discovery was made at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[776,9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-363484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-long-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}