One local missing person case seems to have ended in tragedy after a body was found at the bottom of Decker Canyon in Malibu this week. Officials have not confirmed the identification of the remains, though a vehicle found in the canyon was linked back to a month-old missing person case.
Emergency personnel from the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s Station, Malibu Search and Rescue (SAR) and Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a call received Thursday, Feb. 22, “sometime after two in the afternoon,” regarding a vehicle and deceased individual, according to Sgt. Wright at the Lost Hills Station. The incident was reported by a hiker, who initially spotted the vehicle.
Malibu SAR and the fire department went over the side—a distance of about “300 feet over,” or one-and-a-half miles above Pacific Coast Highway—to the vehicle, after a hiker suspected a body was located inside.
In a phone call with The Malibu Times, Sgt. Wright confirmed “There was, in fact, a deceased individual in there.”Â
The body was brought up and the coroner conducted an investigation. The City of Malibu sent out a traffic advisory alert as of 5:40 p.m. regarding lane closures due to a “car over the side.”Â
Upon testing the license plate, the sheriff’s department traced the vehicle “back to a missing person that we’ve been looking for a month.”Â
The incident is currently being investigated by the missing persons unit in LASD homicide investigations.
As to how long the body had been there, Sgt. Wright estimates that “it had been a while”—up to several weeks.
Cars going “over the side” in Malibu’s winding canyons is a common occurrence. Back in February 2006, a Ferrari famously was halved when it went over the side of Decker. More recently, in 2015 a woman was rescued aver her vehicle went over the side of Latigo Canyon Road and she was trapped inside for two days. Later that year, a Tesla went over the side of Malibu Canyon Road and ignited a fire that killed the sole occupant of the vehicle.Â
