ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Police announced Monday that the body of a young man recovered Friday night from the water of Lake Ontario has been positively identified as Max Maisel.
Maisel, an RIT student, went missing in Feb. 2015. His car was later found near the Charlotte Pier.
The body was found by a fisherman about 200 yards away from the Coast Guard station.
Maisel's father, ESPN senior writer Ivan Maisel, and mother, Meg Murray, released this statement in conjunction with the police findings:
We would like to thank the U.S. Coast Guard and the Rochester Police Department, including the Office of the Medical Examiner, for their work over the weekend to remove Max’s remains from Lake Ontario and make a positive identification. We appreciate everything they, as well as so many other public safety officials in the region, have done for us over the last eight weeks.
We knew this day would come, and we are relieved that it has. But it is merely the postscript to our sad story. We have mourned Max from the night that the Rochester police called to tell us he was missing. There was no other plausible solution to the puzzle he left behind.
Now we must get on with living with this hole in our lives.
Death cannot take away the love we continue to have for our son and the love that our daughters have for their brother. Death will not rob us of that.
We have our memories of a sweet boy who grew into a sensitive, caring young man. We have his photography, a record of the talent he had just begun to develop. We have the care and concern of family and friends in our home of Fairfield, CT, and across the country. Here again, we must say thanks to the people of Rochester and Monroe County, who took our devastating news and made it their own. Whatever gratitude we express here is wholly inadequate.
And we have how desperately we miss him. That will not go away.
Ivan Maisel and Meg Murray