The woman found in Salt Pond Bay Thursday morning likely drowned, police said Wednesday, contrary to nearly a week of widespread public speculation about the nature of her death.
The cause-of-death evaluation was preliminary, however, pending a full autopsy and toxicology report, the Virgin Islands Police Department said. Speculation about the cause of death — from boat strike to shark attack — was likely due to the condition of the woman’s body, which appeared to have been bitten by a large marine animal after she was dead, police said.
Julia Reynolds, 43, was remembered by friends as an outgoing, cheerful, athletic person who loved to swim. Although living on St. John less than a year, she quickly became a favorite in the close-knit Coral Bay community, they said.
“She was the kind of person, I don’t know, you just wanted to hug her,” a friend said.
One of those friends hiked the Ram Head Trail with Reynolds that June 4. She and Reynolds put their feet in the sea and then parted ways at about 8:30 a.m., she said Tuesday night.
An hour later, a couple visiting from Austin, Texas, parked their car at Salt Pond Beach for a morning snorkel. Roughly 1200 feet out in the middle of the bay, near a rocky outcropping, one of them came across Reynold’s body. Swimming to shore, he saw emergency responders waving in alarm from the trail above. He called 911 at 10:43, according to his phone records. The first 911 call had come in at 9:54, police said.
Deeply shaken by what he’d seen, the man told investigators from the Virgin Islands National Park of the body’s severe condition.
“Thank God my kids didn’t see,” he said Wednesday by telephone.
Like many, the tourists had been checking Virgin Islands news and social media for information on the death but found nothing until Tuesday night, when, after days of requests, the National Park released a statement acknowledging there was an incident in the bay but nothing more.
