MELBOURNE, Fla. (WFTV) – A decade-old missing persons case has been solved after divers found the remains of a 47-year-old professor and mother in a retention pond near her home.
Divers with Sunshine State Sonar made a 24-foot dive to the bottom of a retention pond Dec. 20 in Melbourne, Florida, and saw the 2003 Honda Odyssey they’d been searching for for four months. The group’s goal is to find missing people or vehicles believed to be in waterways.
Inside the van were the remains of 47-year-old Katya Belaya, a professor and mother of three, who vanished in September 2014 after telling her daughter she was going out for a quick trip to the store. She was found roughly 1.6 miles from her home.
Mike Sullivan, the co-founder of Sunshine State Sonar, says other teams attempted the search over the years, but with 500 bodies of water within a few square miles of Belaya’s home, they always hit dead ends.
Sullivan says one of the group’s followers alerted them to Belaya’s case this summer, and detectives helped by providing her final cell phone ping. But it still took 50 hours of work to narrow the search down.
“We searched 33 bodies of water before we found her. I just thought that this was one of those cases that was gonna go 400 or 500 bodies of water before we found her. I think we were all pretty surprised, actually, how quick we ended up finding her,” Sullivan said.
Deputies made the positive identification Thursday but said they may never confirm Belaya’s cause of death because of the condition of her remains.
“We’re so happy that we can do this for this family. I know it’s not closure. We always say it’s never closure for these families. It’s answers to where their loved one’s been,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan says this is his group’s 15th find since its founding in 2023. They are working more than 70 cases, mostly in South Florida.
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