Buried bodies found in Victorville, California belong to missing McStay family

BONES found in the Califoia desert this week have been identified as belonging to members of the missing McStay family, who disappeared from their home in February 2010.

Law enforcement officials told a family member on Thursday that skeletal remains found in Victorville had been identified as Joseph McStay, 42, and his wife Summer, 45, The Los Angeles Times reports.

The remains of two additional bodies were also found on Monday by a motorcyclist who was offroading nearby. Those bodies remain unidentified but are believed by the boys’ grandfather Patrick McStay to belong to the couple’s children, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr, 3.

Mr McStay has not spoken directly with officials.

After Monday’s discovery, investigators excavated the site finding two shallow graves holding the remains of four people.

A few days after the family went missing nearly four years ago, Joseph McStay’s brother Mike notified the authorities.

Investigators found no signs of struggle at the house and neighbours said they had not seen the family in days. The neighbours had been feeding the family’s dogs.

Summer McStay and her son Joseph Jr.

"The bottom line," the lead investigator in the case, Troy Dugal, told The Los Angeles Times in 2011, "was that life was normal for the McStays up to February 4, and on that day they just vanished."

At the time, Joseph was 40 and Summer 43.

Investigators discoverd family's car had been towed from the car park of a shopping mall in San Ysidro, an hour's drive from the family’s home and a short walk from a pedestrian crossing into Mexico.

Investigators examined surveillance footage from the border crossing and saw a man holding the hand of a young boy followed by a woman holding the hand of another boy.

"My son didn't walk away," Patrick McStay said on Thursday. "They didn't walk into Mexico. They would never do that."

He said he suspected foul play early on. Although the discovery of the remains answers the question of whether the family are surviving somewhere, for Patrick McStay, too many questions remain unanswered. "It's far from being done yet - far from being done," he said. "It won't be done until I find out what happened, and why, and who."