The DeKalb County Medical Examiner's Office was working Monday to identify a woman whose badly decomposed body was found Sunday in Lake Lanier.
Officials hope fingerprints and dental records will help them positively identify the woman.
Shortly before noon Sunday, fishermen spotted the body near a bridge by the Dawsonville marina in Gainesville.
Officials pulled the body from the lake with a marine rescue boat, Gainesville police Sgt. Kevin Holbrook said.
Construction worker Doug Driscoll was with a crew performing routine maintenance on the bridge at the time. When Driscoll snapped photos of the rescue crew pulling the body from the water, he told Channel 2 Action News he didn’t think it was a person.
“I don’t know how long it’d been in the water, but it didn’t resemble a body,” he said.
As of Monday afternoon, the medical examiner had not completed an autopsy.
“It was very hard to determine anything on the body due to the stage of decomposition that she was in,” Hall County sheriff’s spokeswoman Nicole Bailes said Monday. “We really need to wait and see what the autopsy indicates.”
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