ATLANTA — New information emerged Tuesday about the discovery of the body of 17-year-old Yaron Khaturi on Saturday, more than three weeks after he disappeared.
The cause of death is still under investigation.
It turns out that it was Yaron himself who provided the clue that led a private investigator straight to him.
Family, friends and volunteers couldn’t have known during those three weeks when they were searching for Yaron, and praying in the parking lot of Arbor Place Mall in Douglasville, how close they were to him.
It turns out the teen's body was in the woods just behind the mall where his car had been found.
This past Friday, private investigator K.C. Rowe of Katella Investigations uncovered the clue that Yaron himself had left: his final phone call.
Rowe was hired with donations raised to help the Khaturi family's search, and he found out Friday that a friend had been FaceTiming with Yaron the morning Yaron disappeared, Sept. 28.
Rowe said that the friend told him Yaron was describing deep, personal problems he thought were impossible for him to resolve. Yaron had described similar problems in a call minutes earlier to his parents, Andrew and Vera Khaturi, who had been trying to get him help.
“And he kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ And then he was crying,” Vera said Sunday about the call.
The friend told Rowe that while talking with him on FaceTime, Yaron moved the phone to the side, allowing a view of the area around him.
“It showed a wooded area, it also showed you that he was either sitting up against or near, like, a concrete wall of some sort." Rowe said. "And it showed a square hole” in that concrete wall.
The next morning, Saturday, Oct. 22, Rowe went straight to the dense woods in back of Arbor Place Mall in Douglasville, four miles from Yaron’s home. The location was near the cell phone tower where the teen's phone had last pinged, and where so many of the searches had concentrated.
Rowe walked into the woods, and down the steep hill to a reservoir, and found a tall, spillway tower at the water’s edge—concrete, with square openings along the side.
“I looked down inside, and was able to see what we believed at the moment would have been Yaron. And it turned out, it was,” the private investigator said.
Rowe also found evidence there that Yaron might have climbed a tree next to the tower to get to the top.
There was no covering on the top, and Rowe said it would have been a fall of about 50 feet to the dry bottom inside the tower, below the surface of the surrounding water.
As for Yaron’s phone? Rowe said it was gone.
Why hadn’t Yaron’s friend come forward earlier with the information?
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Rowe told 11Alive. “But what I do know is that I was the only investigator that he spoke to.”
Yaron’s parents said again Tuesday they are hoping the GBI autopsy will tell them more about how their son died. His body has not yet been released to them so they can plan his funeral.
They're expressing gratitude to Rowe for finding him.
Rowe said Yaron’s family and friends had told him about the boy's personal issues of the past several weeks that seemed to be derailing him.
“The young man was obviously hurt,” Rowe said. “And based on the information I had with me and the communications that I had with people who were talking with him that day, he was in a great deal of pain. The world was being cruel. He may have suffered from some bullying at school. A great kid, a musician, well-liked by his group, polite, quiet.”
Rowe paused, and took a breath.
“Not the hope that the family had wanted,” Rowe said, “but it is the answer that they contacted me and my firm for: Where is their loved one?”
Ultimately, it was Yaron, himself, who inadvertently left him the clue.