The remains of an Orlando mother who vanished nearly 12 years ago were found in a retention pond near Disney World, according to the rescue group who found her.
Sandra Lemire vanished in May 2012 after going on a date with a man she met online. The case went cold until last week when Sunshine State Sonar, a search and recovery team, received new details from the Orlando Police Department, the group said in a Facebook post.
That information led Sunshine State Sonar to a pond in Kissimmee, Florida, where the red minivan Lemire was driving had ended up following a car accident.
“Deep in my heart, I always thought this was a foul play case. And it turned out to be just a bad, terrible car accident,” Mike Sullivan with Sunshine State Sonar told NBC affiliate WESH of Daytona Beach. “I’m just so proud of our team.”
The Orlando Police Department confirmed that the minivan was connected to Lemire’s missing person case. Florida Department of Law Enforcement is working on identifying the remains found in the van, police said Tuesday.
Lemire left her grandmother’s house in Orlando on May 8, 2012, to meet up with a man in Kissimmee that she had been talking to on a dating app, Sunshine State Sonar said. She was driving her grandmother’s van at the time.
The rescue team said Lemire called her grandmother when she arrived in Kissimmee and promised to call again before her trip back home. But she never called.
The investigation found that Lemire was last seen in the minivan leaving Denny’s restaurant in Kissimmee, the group said.
The Sunshine State Sonar began assisting in the search in July 2022. Over the past 17 months, 63 bodies of water were searched, according to the Facebook post.
Last week, when the group received new information from police, it began mapping new search areas. On Saturday, the team said it got a “hit on sonar in a small retention pond at the Disney World exit,” the group said on Facebook.
“We located what appeared to be a minivan submerged in 14 feet…
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