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Vanished 11 Years Ago, Missing Mom Mystery is Resolved

Remains of mother, two daughters found in van in canal identified

By Jeff Burnside

| Friday, Apr 2, 2010 | Updated 7:15 AM EST

Vanished 11 Years Ago, Missing Mom Mystery is Resolved

Nelta Jacques and her daughters.

On a rainy night, June 3, 1999, Nelta Jacques and her two young daughters left Fort Lauderdale driving toward home in Tampa. They disappeared.

Eleven years later, their mystery has been solved.

There was no foul play, no person of interest. Detectives and a team from the Broward County Medical Examiner’s office finally laid the Jacques mystery to rest Thursday, ruling it an accident.

Nelta’s hunter green Dodge minivan was found in a canal Wednesday by a BSO dive team during a training session. Inside, still in seatbelts were four skeletal remains; Nelta, Juanita, Johana and Nelta’s unborn daughter. Authorities believe she turned off I-75’s rain soaked pavement at Mile Marker 31 near the boat ramp, perhaps to wait out the storm. In so doing, they believe she accidentally plundered into a canal where the wreckage sat 18 feet below water for 11 years.

"This is a very bad thing to know now ten years after,” said a somber Jean Jacques, Nelta’s husband at the time. “And you expect to see that person. You expect to know they're alive and they're here. And you hear something happened."

Finally, Jean Jacques knows what happened. Even though he had split from his wife before she died, he’s relieved to know. He thought she'd fled.

"Yes,” he said in broken English from his Tampa home. “I believe they're missing or my wife hide somewhere or they don't want me to know where's my daughter is so I can't take her. Even, I say I would be happy even if she give me child support. I would know she, I would know my daughter is there so I can see her one day…until this morning."

As the police recovered the van, they uncovered the story. "The circumstances of this disappearance,” announced Broward Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper, “the findings simply indicate that this was an accident."

Accidents like this are tragically routine in South Florida's maze of canals. More guardrails are continually installed. But with hundreds of miles of canals, lives will still be lost in them.

Divers from the Broward Sheriff's office made 90 dives in canals last year alone. One in every 100 cars they find has human remains. And scores of other government agencies have their own dive teams to recover cars from canals.

In fact, Dr. Perper called on transportation officials to determine where the most cars drive into canals.

"From our end,” he said, “we are going to review the cases of (bodies in) cars in canals to determine which areas are more dangerous. Certainly those cases that follow a bend would seem to be particularly dangerous."

Photos and Videos

Family Found in Car in Canal IDed