Police say 29-year-old Jordan Scales was found dead Sunday in a wooded area near South Federal Highway, and detectives believe the killing happened sometime over the previous three days.
BOYNTON BEACH, FL — A 29-year-old Ohio man who had recently moved to South Florida was found dead in a wooded area near South Federal Highway on Sunday morning, and Boynton Beach police are investigating the case as a homicide with no arrest announced as of Tuesday.
Scales’ death has left his family grieving across state lines while detectives work to determine who killed him and why. Police have said only that officers were called to the area around 7 a.m. Sunday and that investigators believe the homicide occurred sometime between Thursday, April 16, and Sunday, April 19. The limited public information has sharpened the family’s push to have Scales remembered not only as a victim in an open case, but as a son, brother and father whose life was more complicated than a brief police description could capture.
According to Boynton Beach police, officers responded Sunday morning to reports of a body in a wooded area near the 1900 block of South Federal Highway. When they arrived, they found Scales dead. Detectives later said they believed he had been killed sometime during the three-day span before his body was discovered. Authorities have not publicly described how Scales was killed, what evidence was recovered at the scene, or whether investigators have identified a suspect or person of interest. The body was found near a stretch of roadway and parkland east of U.S. 1, an area where traffic, water access and patches of brush sit close together. By Tuesday, police were still asking anyone with information to contact Detective Leitner as the investigation remained active. No court filing, arrest report or charging document had been announced.
For Scales’ family, the first public details landed with a second blow: the struggle of seeing a loved one reduced to a few lines in a police release. His sister, Hilary Lee, said her brother grew up in Ohio in a family that spent much of its time around fishing, boats and the outdoors. He loved water, she said, and felt most at peace outside. Lee said Scales moved to South Florida about two years ago after spending time in other states, including Tennessee and Kentucky, and was trying to steady his life. She said he had past run-ins with the law and struggled with addiction, but she described him as someone who kept trying to do better. “He was trying every day to be better,” Lee said in recounting the last years of his life. She said that even when their relationship was strained, she made sure he knew he was loved and that his family had not given up on him.
That gap between the formal language of an investigation and the life remembered by relatives has become central to how the family is speaking about the case. Police described Scales as a local transient or someone temporarily living in the area. Lee and her fiancé, Ryan Marshall, said that label flattened his life into a stereotype and missed the people who cared about him. Marshall said Scales should be remembered as more than the circumstances he faced at the end of his life. He said Scales was a father to a young daughter, the youngest of three siblings and part of a family that stayed connected to him through his struggles. Lee said the family received the news while on the way to another funeral, a moment she described as shocking even after years of fearing that addiction or instability might bring a terrible call. She said grief has been made harder by harsh reactions online, where strangers have commented on Scales’ history without knowing him.
The case also sits inside a familiar reality for police and families alike: homicide investigations often begin with almost no public detail, especially in the first days, while detectives sort through forensic evidence, witness accounts, phone records and timelines. In Scales’ case, the publicly known facts remain narrow. Police have placed the likely time of death somewhere between April 16 and April 19. They have identified the location where the body was found and confirmed the victim’s name and age. Beyond that, many of the questions that usually shape the early direction of a case remain unanswered in public view. It is not known whether Scales had been seen with anyone in the hours or days before his death, whether there was evidence of a struggle nearby, or whether investigators believe the killing was targeted, random or connected to people he knew. It is also not clear whether surveillance cameras from nearby roads or businesses captured useful footage. Those gaps have left family members pleading for anyone who saw him or spoke with him to come forward.
Even with those unknowns, the family has tried to fill in the parts of Scales’ life that the case file cannot. Lee said he was the kind of person whose laugh and energy stood out in a room. She described him as a free spirit who could drift from place to place, not because he lacked people who cared for him, but because he often seemed to be searching for where he fit. She said that in hard periods he talked about sleeping outdoors or camping in order to keep distance from people and habits that pulled him backward. Family members have said he was doing his best with the circumstances he faced, and that his efforts mattered even when the results were uneven. In their telling, Scales was not defined by a police shorthand or by the roughest chapters of his life. He was also a brother whose smile showed up in other family members, an uncle who was loved, and a father whose absence will be felt long after the case moves from headlines to records.
The next stage of the case is likely to depend on what detectives can build from evidence gathered at the scene and from the days before Scales was killed. Investigators typically seek autopsy findings, toxicology results, digital records and interviews to narrow the timeline and identify who last saw the victim alive. Police in Boynton Beach have not announced a briefing or set a date for an update, and they have not said whether additional search warrants or evidence collection efforts are underway. Unless an arrest is made soon, the public picture may stay limited while detectives continue to work behind the scenes. For the family, however, the wait is already defining the case. They are asking not only for information, but for a fuller account of who Scales was. Marshall said the family wants people to understand that “he had a family that loved him,” and Lee said whoever is responsible should turn themselves in or be identified by someone who knows what happened.
As of Tuesday, Jordan Scales’ killing remained unsolved, with detectives saying the homicide likely took place between April 16 and April 19 before his body was found Sunday near South Federal Highway. The next public milestone will likely be an arrest, a police update, or autopsy findings that clarify how he died.
Author note: Last updated April 22, 2026.