Bodies of 3 Missing Teens Found in Remote Region

The bodies of three teen-age San Jacinto boys, missing since Sept. 9, have been found in a remote desert area of Riverside County, authorities said Tuesday.

Friends and relatives said the youths disappeared when one was giving the other two a ride home in his pickup truck. The boys, all neighborhood friends, lived less than a mile apart.

Two bodies were found Sunday in the Hixon Flat area of the San Bernardino National Forest, about 15 miles southeast of Hemet, said Riverside County sheriff’s spokeswoman Pat Cruz.

The third body was found Tuesday, as teams of rescuers from the Sheriff’s Department, the San Jacinto Police Department and other agencies combed the rugged terrain.

A spokesman for the county coroner’s office said the three bodies were in advanced state of decomposition. Although tentatively identified, the names of the youths were being withheld pending autopsies and checks of dental records.

Beatrice Strother of San Jacinto said authorities told her one of the bodies was that of her son, William, 17. Strother said her son disappeared while getting a ride home from one of the missing youths.

Strother said she last saw her son the night of Sept. 8.

“He said he’d be back by 10; that was the last time I saw him,” she said. “He doesn’t do that. I figure he was with his sister. When he wasn’t, I put the police report in.”

U.S. Forest Service rangers found the body of one of the boys and a truck registered to him Sunday morning on a dirt road in Hixon Flat. Helicopters and search teams were dispatched to the area and a second body was found about 2 p.m. three miles west of the truck, just east of Cactus Valley.

Daylight searches resumed Monday and Tuesday. Rescuers found the third body Tuesday, about 1 1/2 miles east of the truck, according to relatives of one of the apparent victims.

“Our theory is that somebody was chasing them for them to split up like that,” said Shirley Durston, a friend of the Strother family. “Willie was taught by his sister how to mountain-climb and how to survive out in the wilderness. He knows all the little tricks. That’s why we can’t picture him at the bottom of a ravine.”

Sheriff’s officials said the case was tentatively being treated as a homicide, routine until autopsies are completed.