Human remains fully removed from car after being submerged in Lake Ontario for years

A painstaking recovery process continued to unfold in Lake Ontario for a second day.

Police divers in Amherstview, Ont., have now recovered human remains found inside a submerged car.

It’s believed the car plunged into the water along Highway 33 and County Road 6 several years ago.

It took all of Wednesday for provincial police divers to remove human remains from the vehicle.

2:02 Amherstview: Provincial Police removing human remains from Lake Ontario

By midday Thursday, the vehicle itself was slowly lifted out of the water. Covered with debris and heavily damaged, the make and model is difficult to identify, but the blue colour of the paint is visible.

“Perhaps this is going to give someone closure on this episode in life,” says Dave Mayell, a resident in the area.

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Mayell’s in-laws have lived on a farm at county roads 33 and 6 for four generations. He says the intersection has a long history of collisions and vehicles ending up in the water.

“Many, many accidents and that from people going too fast around this corner, or coming down County Road 6,” says Mayell.

Police only discovered the vehicle while dealing with another fatal incident earlier in the year, which claimed the life of a local woman.

1:31 OPP say car drove into Lake Ontario near Amherstview Ont.

Divers were locating that vehicle when they also discovered this one. How it ended up in Lake Ontario remains a mystery.

Now with the vehicle and human remains recovered, the real work for investigators begins — to try and determine who was hidden in these waters, and for how long.

“The next step will be to send the human remains for forensic examination, and for the vehicle to be examined closer, to figure out what kind of vehicle it is,” says Const. Shannon Cork with the Lennox & Addington OPP.

Missing persons cases will be re-examined to look for a fit — for example, the case of Amherstview resident David Hannah, who went missing in 1983 and was driving a blue 1969 Delta 88.

At this early stage of the investigation, no such connection can be made, but police say the underwater discovery is likely related to a missing person’s case.

“Now that we have human remains collected, we’ll be able to follow up that investigation and get the identity of that person sorted out,” says Cork.

“Then someone will have closure to where their missing person has been.”