Human remains have been found in a well near the home of a Texas A&M student who vanished earlier this year, authorities said
Caleb Harris, 21, was last seen on March 4 at his apartment complex near the university’s Corpus Christi campus.
On Monday, a city employee in Corpus Christi discovered the remains in the well and notified police around 3:30 p.m., the Corpus Christi Police Department said in a news release. The well is about 40 feet deep and is a wastewater collection point, police said. It’s located in a field near the apartment complex on Ennis Joslin Road.
Authorities drained the wastewater from the well and called in the Corpus Christi Fire Department, who “donned hazardous material suits to retrieve the remains from within the well.”
The Medical Examiner’s office is working to identify the remains, police said.
Corpus Christi Police Chief Mike Markle told local news outlets the body was in an advanced state of decomposition and identification will take time.
“Probably a month to six weeks depending on what they have available for forensics,” Chief Markle said, noting that a recent storm brought the body cloister to the surface.
“It’s been pretty dry lately,” he said. “And with this tropical storm, I guess we got like seven inches of rain over the whole event. And that just kind of shook up the sewage system. And wherever that body may have been, it kind of flushed it out.”
Police said the area had been previously searched when Harris first went missing.
“This whole area has been searched many times over,” a spokesperson for the Corpus Christi Police Department told The Caller-Times.
Police said the investigation into Harris’ disappearance is still “active and ongoing,”
Harris was last seen when he left his home around 3 a.m. to pick up an Uber Eats order. The order was marked as completed and found by his roommate outside of his apartment the next day. But there was no sign of Harris. His car, keys and wallet were left behind.
For four months, police have scoured the area, conducted interviews and assessed surveillance footage, but they are still unaware of where the student, described as a “homebody”, would have gone.
His father Randy Harris told KRIS-TV in April that he spoke with his son, who is originally from New Braunfels, the night before he vanished and everything seemed fine, but hours later, he received the news from his wife that he was missing.
“There’s just nothing there that would cause us to believe he was in any danger or leaving,” he said. “He had actually ordered in his food for the next day for school.”
A GoFundMe created to help pay for search resources has raised more than $70,000 as of Wednesday.
