Jacob Lyon. Credit: Niceville PD/Walton County Sheriff's Office
Skeletal remains discovered in a wooded area by Miramar Beach, Florida in October 2022 have now been positively identified as Jacob Lyon, a 19-year-old who was reported missing from a nearby town in 2016.
Lyon’s mother reported him missing on Feb. 1, 2016 after not seeing him for about 3 months. He was entered into state and national missing persons databases that day. The next day, the Niceville Police Department conducted seven interviews with family members and friends. They also performed forensic analysis on Lyon’s cell phone, but no concrete evidence of his whereabouts was located. At t his time, the Niceville Police Department collected DNA samples from Lyon’s family for future comparison and identification purposes.
Over the years, detectives followed up on more than 20 tips, including reported sightings and possible locations of a body, even employing cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar in searches local to Niceville and broader ones across Florida and surrounding states.
On Oct. 20, 2022, seemingly unrelated skeletal fragments were discovered in a wooded area in Miramar Beach, about 20 miles south of Niceville. At the time, the site was the location of a local hotel.
Between then and 2023, forensic testing was conducted on the highly degraded fragments. In November 2024, DNA from the remains was sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for analysis.
Last week, the Niceville Police Department was notified that the remains found near Miramar Beach are indeed Jacob Lyon. A DNA sample from the remains was compared with one of the samples collected from Lyon’s family back in 2016.
Investigators say the case is now an active death investigation.
“This is not by any means the ending to the investigation, but the start of another,” said Major Dustin Cosson of the Walton County Sheriff’s Office, who has jurisdiction over where the remains were found.
Describing Lyon as a man “trying to find himself,” Lieutenant John Lee emphasized how important it was to give closure to Lyon’s mother, who he has been working with since being assigned the case as a detective in 2016.
“My number one priority was to try and find closure for [Lyons] mother, Judy, who’s been working with me fairly close this entire time,” said Lee. “Ms. Judy and her husband are now concerned with ‘where do we go from here?’ Everybody wants answers.”
Cosson said collaboration and partnership between the Niceville Police Department and the Walton County Sheriff’s Office is imperative going forward, especially since the investigation started—and was still ongoing a decade later—in Niceville.
“We’ll go back through the reports and reinterview individuals to make sure nothing has changed. We’ll go back through the tips and catalog every little bit of information. There could be some factual information in a small portion of what was said 10 years ago, but we don’t know right now,” said Cosson. “It’s our jobs and duties to make sure we get some answers. We may not ever get all the answers. That is an unfortunate part of this job, and an unfortunate part of being a family member of someone who has been gone for 10 years.”