PLEASANT HILL, Iowa — Willow Kam and Kyla Riley were scouting a sandbar at Yellow Banks Park on Friday, looking for a place to set up a tent for the night.
"We were walking up and down to find the best sand. On our way back to go grab our stuff because we found where we wanted. Willow was like 'Is that a can?'" Riley said.
"I thought it was some sort of milk jug with some dents in it maybe," Kam added.
But their find wasn't little; it appeared to be a human skull.
"We were videotaping and taking pictures the whole time. When we took it out, we took a stick and put that up on the ground and circled the area, and we rinsed it off. And we're like, 'Oh, there's more details. This might not be a fake,'" Riley said.
The skull was later turned over to law enforcement, and the medical examiner's office is now working to learn more information about it, such as whether it's real and who it might've belonged to if it is. But that search for answers isn't an easy one.
"It has to go through a battery of tests to make sure it's legit, make sure they you know, get as much information from that evidence as they can," Capt. Ryan Evans with the Polk County Sheriff's Office said Sunday.
Dr. Heather Garvin, a professor of anatomy at Des Moines University, is a forensic anthropologist. She says that when examiners don't have a potential ID for remains, the investigation can become much more difficult.
"If all you have is skeletal remains, you can't do a visual ID, you can't do fingerprints. You can do DNA analyses from bone or from teeth, but that can take a while and you still have to have a match to compare that to," Garvin said.
While the hunt for answers continues, Kam & Riley said that they aren't too shaken up from the experience. But they hope the unexpected find will eventually provide answers for someone out there.
"I'm just glad we didn't come across a still-decaying corps, so I'm happy for that, and I'm happy that it got handed over. And I hope we find out what happened and put some family to closure," Riley said.