Three bodies found in car pulled from pond in front of shopping mall
A vehicle with three dead people was discovered in a retention pond in front of a big shopping mall in Florida.
The 1983 Oldsmobile with ‘multiple deceased occupants’ was found on Saturday morning using sonar in a pond in front of the Sawgrass Mills mall in Sunrise, according to the volunteer group Sunshine State Sonar.
‘Vehicle was submerged in 24 feet of water at the entrance of the mall parking lot,’ wrote the sonar search and recovery team on Facebook on Sunday.
The Oldsmobile was detected as the team specializing in underwater sonar technology searched for missing Sunrise resident Libby Dibenedetto.
Images from the scene showed a dirty white Oldsmobile at the side of the pond beyond police crime tape, as well as police cars and a vehicle with the Broward County Medical Examiner.
‘Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims families,’ wrote Sunshine State Sonar, which engaged in the search in conjunction with Adventures With Purpose.
The identities of the victims were not immediately released. The case remains under investigation.
Sunrise police helped pull the vehicle out, a spokesperson Otishia Browning-Smith told USA Today. It was last registered in 2005.
Sawgrass Mills has more than 350 stores and is ‘the largest outlet and value retail shopping destination in the United States’, according to its website. Sunrise is located about 10 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale.
The three bodies were recovered less than a week after Sunshine State Sonar located the body of Orlando resident Sandra Lemire in a vehicle submerged in a retention pond near Disney World. Lemire was last seen in May 2012 leaving a Denny’s restaurant in Kissimmee after meeting a man from an online dating site.
Her remains were taken out of the pond on New Year’s Eve, and her son, Timothy Lemire, thanked the team for bringing ‘this long mysterious case to an end’.
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