Woman’s remains possibly found after eight years of searching
After an eight-year search that drew investigators at least twice to a woodsy swath near Florida’s Turnpike and a landfill in Miami Gardens, police have unearthed what they believe are the remains of a 40-year-old Hallandale Beach woman who went missing on a Friday morning in 2010.
Lynda Meier never showed up to give her mother a ride to a doctor’s appointment that day. Instead she left her apartment before sunrise, later withdrew cash from an ATM, chatted by cellphone with a young man she had mentored since he was 13 and drove west on Hallandale Beach Boulevard.
That was it. She wasn’t seen or heard from again.
“Her death is something everybody has accepted for
a long time,” said Paul Smerechniak, a private investigator hired by the family in 2012.
Police called Meier’s mother, Phylis Meier, around 5 p.m. Wednesday to share the news. An officer had dug up body parts buried near a canal in Miami Gardens. Wooded acreage they had searched before; a spot just five miles north of where an Opalocka cop found Meier’s Cadillac Escalade two days after she vanished.
“Obviously it's bittersweet,” Smerechniak said. Meier’s mother is “just overjoyed that in her lifetime she was found and she’ll be able to give her a proper ceremony.”
Police confirmed in an announcement Thursday afternoon that human remains had been found near the area in which Meier was last believed to have been.
“Any further information or identification is pending examination from the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office,” a spokeswoman for the Hallandale Beach Police Department said.
Two felons were long considered persons of interest. But neither Antwan Kennedy, 35, of Miami, nor his friend Dallas King, also 35, has
been charged in connection with Meier’s disappearance or death. King is imprisoned for an armed robbery in 2007.
Kennedy, the boy Meier had mentored since the mid-90s and the last person she spoke to before her disappearance, was released from a Pennsylvania prison about a year ago after serving nearly three years for a probation violation out of Broward County.
When reached by telephone Thursday evening, Kennedy’s mother requested that reporters never call her number again. She lives in Brownsville, west of Opa-locka. Kennedy has listed her address as his before. It is a straight shot 15 miles south on the Turnpike from where the human remains were discovered Wednesday.
Meier volunteered working with troubled youth in Miami’s Overtown. That is when and where she met Kennedy.
That is a part of Meier’s life that she kept private, her friend of more than 20 years, Sharon Moses-Salano said.
“I was never introduced to him,” she said. “She spoke of somebody she mentored and referred to him as her little brother.”
Moses-Salano owns a beauty salon in Aventura and said Meier was both
close friend and customer. “We just clicked, you know.”
Meier was lonely yet sociable, her friend said. And she liked to hang out at the salon. But in the six months before she disappeared, something had changed.
“She lost a lot of weight. She stopped being so sociable,” MosesSalano said. “She would park in my parking lot and call me and ask if anyone was in my store, and I found that disturbing.”
Moses-Salano said she considered talking to Meier’s mother about the change in behavior but she “didn’t want to lose her friendship by going over her head.”
That’s a regrettable failure on her part, Moses-Salano said. She wonders whether she could have prevented whatever misfortune befell her friend.
“It’s been hell waiting all these years,” she said. “She’s always in my heart and thoughts and prayers. The news for me has been quite difficult.”
Hallandale Beach Police are working alongside the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in the case. Anyone who has information regarding Lynda Meier is urged to call FDLE at 800-226-3023.