Car, bone fragments found in WPB lake
’70s cold-case search reveals a later mystery
The Palm Beach Zoo & Conservation Society has announced the birth of a Hoffman’s two-toed sloth.
Both mom and baby are healthy and thriving, the zoo said in release on Feb. 2, adding, “The baby will depend on its mother for a few months and our veterinary and animal staff have been carefully monitoring mom and baby 24 hours a day.”
The baby was born about 4 a.m. Jan. 23. Its gender is not yet known.
“It is very difficult to determine the gender of baby sloths at this age. As the baby continues to develop we will keep ... the community updated,” Erin Ward, the zoo’s vice president of marketing, said Thursday in an email to the Daily News.
Wilbur, the sloth’s mother, gave birth inside her specially designed climate
What began as an excursion for volunteer divers last week in West Palm Beach has turned into a potentially decades-old mystery after the team found an older model car submerged in a lake near Interstate 95.
City police investigators are trying to determine how and when the vehicle, believed to be a late-1980s model Honda, ended up in a lake just south of 45th Street, and who was in it.
A dive group hired by a family to investigate the 1979 disappearance of a man named Michael Olson discovered the car on the morning of Feb. 9, police spokesperson Mike Jachles said.
Investigators think the vehicle, judging by its condition, had been submerged for several years, Jachles said. However, they don’t believe it is connected to the Olson case. According to The Charley Project, a non-profit organization that tracks cold case missing person investigations, Olson was last seen in West Palm Beach on Dec. 1, 1979, and was known to drive a maroon 1979 Pontiac Grand Prix.
Oslon was a 20-year-old University of Minnesota business student and Minnesota native who was taking time off from school and had started a job at a West Palm Beach country club just weeks prior to his disappearance, according to an online summary from The Charley Project.
Police divers retrieved the submerged vehicle on Feb. 10, and the department referred the case to its Missing Persons unit. The vehicle had damage that was consistent with a crash, Jachles said.
“We believe this car could have been in there for decades,” he said.
With the assistance of sonar technology, the vehicle was located southwest of I-95 and 45th Street in about 12.5 feet of water and 30 to 40 feet from the shore. It was covered in silt and heavily corroded, making it difficult for investigators to recover identifying information, Jachles said.
A diver from the volunteer crew discovered bone fragments and brought