Investigators have yet to determine the sex or age of human remains discovered in a plastic barrel recovered Friday where it was lodged into the side Gasconade city of the boat ramp.

“We don’t know if it’s male or if it’s female or the age,” said Gasconade County Sheriff John Romanus on Tuesday evening.

Romanus announced the recovery of the barrel at 8:02 p.m. Monday in a Facebook post and email to area media outlets.

“We don’t know the sex or the identity,” he told The Republican. “I would assume it’s going to be a little while until we get to that point.”

He declined to comment on the condition of the remains and said the cause of death was undetermined at this time.

“There’s not a whole lot of information I choose to, or can release, at this point,” he added.

Sheriff’s deputies and members of the Missouri State Highway Patrol Marine Division removed the barrel the afternoon of April 12. Romanus said the barrel was not opened at the scene but “transported to the medical examiner’s office to have it looked at.”

In his release Monday, Romanus noted, “Investigators determined the barrel and its contents to be suspicious and (it) was subsequently taken to the Boone County Medical Examiner’s Office in Columbia.” 

Pressed for additional details on what made them believe this was a suspicious discovery, Romanus said, “suspicious in that you would find something like that where it was, located like that, makes someone wonder. We had to transport it somewhere  where they had the means to X-ray it.”

He said the barrel was discovered by the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Water Patrol Division and sheriff’s deputies. 

“The process of determining who it is may take longer than I like but that’s what we’re up against,” Romanus said. “We’re working with the medical examiner’s office to give us some more information so we can notify the next of kin.”

He said he has not been made aware of any surgical devices in the remains or identification chips on implanted hardware which might lead to a quick identification. Contents of the barrel were not examined until Monday, Romanus said. 

Romanus declined to provide a description of the barrel in size and color and if the barrel was discovered on the upstream side or downstream side of the ramp. 

“That is information that I’m not releasing at this time,” Romanus replied in an email earlier Tuesday to The Republican. 

A resident of Gasconade who spoke with The Republican said several people from the area saw a large, blue plastic barrel floating downstream near the Highway 100 bridge on the evening of Thursday, April 11. A similar barrel was spotted upstream about three miles from there earlier in the week.

A resident who spoke with The Republican said investigators discovered the barrel wedged into a tree which was on the upstream side of the Missouri Department of Conservation’s public access ramp at Gasconade. Romanus declined to comment.

Backwater from Missouri River flooding, and local rains along the Gasconade River basin to a lesser extent, have caused continuous flooding at the MDC’s ramp and the parking lot at Gasconade city since March 13.

According to Facebook posts by Kevin Kennedy, a local resident there and river enthusiast, water covered the ramp as of March 13.

By March 16, the river had pushed four feet of water up onto the parking lot. The river had dropped about two feet as of March 22 and Kennedy noted there was no longer trash and debris flowing down river.

By March 31, however, Kennedy noted the river had come back up, filling the parking lot with up to eight feet of water. 

By April 6, the river was dropping and the ramp would be “visible soon,” he reported. By Tuesday, April 9, the park lot was “out of water but covered in mud.”

Three days later, lawmen began the recovery of the barrel which contained human remains.