PUYALLUP, Wash. — Over the weekend, Puyallup police alerted the community that a major search operation would be going on by the railroad tracks between 5th Street SE and 10th Street SE. Roughly 40 people set out to search the area this weekend after human remains were found by the tracks nearly two weeks ago.
Damien Allen works at a car wash near the railroad tracks in Puyallup and saw some of the action this past weekend, “I’m assuming that something big happened because of all cop cars and commotion around here. I didn’t know there were skeletal remains.”
Allen knows the area near the railroad crossing is pretty busy on an average day, so he was surprised when police closed roads around East Main Avenue on Saturday, “At first it was like, three fire trucks that came out, and then like three police cars down there where the light is, by the drive-in coffee, they had the road closed all the way down to here.”
He says traffic was snarled as dozens of law enforcement personnel scoured the railroad tracks.
Allen says he didn’t know that the search was preceded by the discovery of human skeletal remains.
“That’s scary, to be honest. I didn’t know, I don’t know whose remains they are or how old they are but it’s worrisome that they are so close. I mean they’re (the tracks) literally right there,” said Allen.
Captain Kevin Gill, Public Information Officer with the Puyallup Police Department, offered new details to KIRO 7 about the initial discovery of the bones, “A citizen found some small fragments of bone walking along the tracks and turned them over to patrol officers who did a search of the area.”
He says the initial search by police officers a few weeks ago happened in the dark, so law enforcement decided to come back and do a bigger search over the weekend during the day, “That’s when we called in SAR, they have some specially trained dogs to detect human remains.”
According to Captain Gill, Search and Rescue (SAR) teams, the medical examiner, police personnel, and BNSF railroad staff helped in the search. The original bones turned out to be human, but Gill did say that some of the ones found this past weekend were animal bones, and the rest couldn’t be identified. Many of the unidentified bones were sent to the medical examiner’s office in the hopes that their origin could be determined.
Investigators now hope to develop a DNA profile on the human bones if possible. Puyallup police have no idea how the bones ended up by the tracks, but do not believe there is any danger to the public, “We don’t have any indication yet as to how they got there, that’s something we’re certainly investigating… it’s something very interesting to us. Something we’re quite anxious to figure out.”
©2025 Cox Media Group
