Seventeen-year-old Cengiz Han Nuray was hanging out with friends at Greyhound Rock Beach in Santa Cruz County on April 27, 1995.
Nuray and his friends were Grateful Dead rock band followers. According to a missing person report, he branched off from the group to go on a walk alone, leaving his personal belongings behind.
He never returned.
Nuray's family lived in Santa Barbara and reported him missing to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office. For two decades, no one saw or heard from the teen, and his family wondered what happened.
The same year Nuray vanished, a body was found floating in the ocean near Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove.
Because the body was badly decomposed, investigators were only able to determine that the person was a man. The remains were classified as John Doe.
Pacific Grove police, together with the Monterey County Sheriff's Coroner's Office, recently reopened the case and resubmitted DNA from the body to the California Department of Justice laboratory.
Thanks to advances in DNA technology, the lab was able to make a match on Dec. 30, 2014. The person found dead off Asilomar State Beach was confirmed to be Nuray, a Monterey County Sheriff's spokesman told KSBW.
"The remains were formally identified as a 17-year-old male who was reported missing by his mother in 1995," Pacific Grove police said. "After almost 20 years, the family will finally have closure and (Nuray) will be laid to rest."
