Update on Sarah

NILES — With dental records providing a probable match to a skull found in Warren Township, the family of Sarah M. Jones is ready to celebrate her life and mourn her death.

“We decided to have a memorial service on Saturday because March 15 is three years to the day from when she disappeared,” Jones’ mother, Susan Gaskill, said.

The skull believed to belong to the 25-year-old woman was found in April 2007. A woman on Hewitt Gifford Road S.W. discovered that her dog had brought home from a large, wooded area what she thought was an old ball. It turned out to be a human skull.

Police immediately began thinking of Jones, who disappeared after visiting her brother’s grave in Pine Knoll Cemetery March 15, 2005. Police sent the skull away for testing, and took dental records and DNA samples.

Gaskill said police told her the dental records provided a 99.99 percent match with the skull.

“It’s been horrible,” she said of the last three years.

Jones called home three times on Easter Sunday 2005 — 12 days after she’d run into the woods — but didn’t speak to her mother or sister.

“She was crying hysterically,” Gaskill said. “We were saying, ‘Please come home. Where are you?’ But she didn’t speak.”

Gaskill said she believes foul play was involved.

“She would have never left her children,” she said.

Jones had three children. At the time of her disappearance, her daughter was 9 years old; her two sons were 7 years and 5 months old.

“I told them at first, I kept saying, ‘I’m gonna find your mom for you. I’ll find her,’” Gaskill said. “If it takes the rest of my life I will find out what happened to her.”

The family first feared the skeleton found at Mosquito Lake State Park in July 2006 was Jones. However, those remains turned out to belong to a still- unidentified 50-year-old black man who was about 5 feet 8 inches tall.

Gaskill said she has spent the last three years following up on leads from people in the community who have thought they saw Jones.

“I hung up her picture all over Youngstown, Warren, Niles. In grocery stores, in buildings, everywhere. Sometimes people would call me and say they thought they saw her; I would go out and check,” Gaskill said.

The memorial service will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Robert P. McDermott Memorial Home in Niles. There are no remains to be buried. Police and the coroner are continuing their investigation into Jones’ disappearance and apparent death, and the skull remains in their custody.

Gaskill said she plans to have Jones’ name added to her brother’s grave marker in Pine Knoll Cemetery where his cremated remains were interred with those of his father’s.

Now the family is holding the memorial service to provide a sense of peace and closure.

“At least that is what I’m hoping,” Gaskill said.

Warren Township police said the matter remains open and under investigation.

Trumbull County forensic pathologist Humphrey Germaniuk said he is “pretty certain” the remains are that of Jones, but without the DNA results, he said he can’t be positive. The state laboratory is overloaded with work and has not been able to perform the analysis, so he will be requesting a recommendation for an alternate laboratory to do the work, he said.

“It’s not like on CSI where you put in the DNA and a result comes back in 40 minutes,” he said.

The skull was sent away for study, and the report’s findings were consistent with belonging to Jones, he said.