Police are mystified by body on beach
Galveston investigators trying to ID boy, treating death as a possible homicide
Galveston police need help identifying a young boy whose body was found Friday evening not far from the ocean surf line in a case that they are treating as a possible homicide.
GALVESTON — Joshua Schirard hasn’t seen a case like it in more than a dozen years with the Galveston Police Department.
A young child, a boy no more than 5-years old, was found dead on a littletraversed stretch of beach not far from the ocean surf line in Galveston on Friday evening. No one there has reported a missing child matching the description of the 3-feet tall, 30-pound child with dark brown hair, likely of Hispanic descent. Local authorities, surrounding counties and federal agencies have not yet found any missing persons cases that could be the boy.
For now, the boy’s body has no identity, no one to claim it and no concrete answers about how or why he died. The medical examiner’s autopsy report won’t be available for weeks. There is only the sketch of a toddler, grinning ear to ear, flashing bright eyes and a row of shining baby teeth, drawn by Texas forensic artist Lois Gibson, based on photographs provided by detectives of a boy who had only just begun to decompose.
In the vast majority of drowning cases across 37 miles of Galveston beach — usually, around 10 or 20 a year — there is a witness, someone who saw the victim go into the water or tried to save them. For the unnamed boy, there was no one.
“We don’t have bodies just wash up on our beach with no story behind them, much less 3- to 5-year-old children,” said Schirard, operations bureau commander at the Galveston Police Department, during a news briefing in Galveston. “It’s not something that happens here.”
Police are treating the case as a possible homicide. Officials have also not ruled out human trafficking or an accidental death. It’s not clear yet whether the body washed ashore or was placed in the area. It’s not clear how long the body was in the water, if at all, or whether the boy drowned.
Galveston authorities contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploit-
ed Children for any records matching the case. So far, nothing has turned up. The more time passes, the more alarms the case raises, Schirard said.
“The circumstances are without a doubt suspicious,” he said. “There are no answers at this point.”
There were no distinguishing characteristics that could have led police to identify the child, he said. The boy’s body did not appear to have sustained trauma and was found unclothed – not unusual in drowning cases, in which a few minutes in the surf can remove clothing from a person, Schirard said. Police and Gibson said the body was not severely decomposed and was “fairly intact,” with no missing limbs.
The boy was found by a 911 caller at 5:30 p.m. Friday in the 700 block of Seawall Boulevard. It’s a stretch that Schirard described as “not a heavily traversed part of our beach,” lying somewhere between two major Galveston beaches, Stewart beach and the region’s primary beach near Seawall Boulevard.
Officials said they are asking anyone with information to call police at 409765-3776.
“These detectives are working so hard to try to make sure we can get some headway very early on in this case,” Schirard said. “Identifying this child is going to be one of the biggest things we can do to direct this case and make sure we can figure out how this happened and what happened out there.”