Exeter police find additional remains of missing Reading man

May 17—Exeter Township police have discovered additional remains of 21-year-old Anthony Evan Rodriguez, who was reported missing more than nine years ago by his parents.

In their announcement Thursday, police said on April 2 they were called to a wooded area in the Five Points section of the township for the discovery of possible human remains. Working through the night, detectives and investigators from the Berks County Coroner's Office collected several bones and a skull.

Dental records were used to confirm the skull was that of Rodriguez.

A subsequent search on April 15 yielded additional remains.

This latest discovery came a little less than a year after investigators held a press conference in April 2023 confirming that Rodriquez was no longer a missing person, revealing that his partial remains had been uncovered in a wooded area in the township in 2020.

Rodriguez was reported missing May 13, 2015, when he was living in Reading. He was last seen alive three days earlier walking toward a wooded area in the Five Points section of the township near the Alsace Township border.

There had been conflicting reports regarding the last sighting of Rodriguez, but in 2020 Detective Gregory Davis, who was the lead detective at the time, attempted to retrace the missing man's footsteps into the woods from the home where he had been working as a landscaper.

In 2020 two exhaustive searches were conducted with the help of Exeter Township Fire Department and regional human-remains search-and-recovery outfits equipped with cadaver-detection dogs. Near the end of the second search, Davis found two human femur bones on top of the soil about 20 yards apart.

The bones were sent to a laboratory for DNA extraction and analysis and were confirmed to be those of Rodriguez.

The bones were intact, and there was no indication that they were removed by a cutting tool.

Three subsequent searches were conducted in the wooded acreage surrounding the area where the bones were found, but no additional remains were found.

It took a few months for the match to be confirmed.

The current lead investigator, Detective Joseph Malone, said during the April 2023 press conference that Davis took a fresh look at the case and was able to eliminate several theories about Rodriguez's disappearance.

Investigators say they have their own theories but wouldn't disclose them.

Based on the condition of the skeletal remains, a cause and manner of death cannot be determined, they said.

Police say they continue to investigate how he died but would not term it a homicide investigation.

With a new lead investigator on the case, police said last April that it was a good time to go public with the findings in the hopes that someone will provide information that brings full closure of the family.