Human foot found on Washington beach

PORT ANGELES, Wash. – The Clallam County sheriff’s office says a black athletic shoe found on a county beach last week contained human remains.

Undersheriff Ron Peregrin said Monday that the King County medical examiner determined the foot was human, and that it detached from its body naturally after floating in the water.

The shoe was found Friday along the Strait of Juan de Fuca – a saltwater channel about 14 miles wide that separates Washington’s Olympic Peninsula from British Columbia’s Vancouver Island.

Peregrin says the foot will be sent for a forensic investigation, with results of a DNA profile taking six to eight weeks.

The remains appear to be from a human right foot and were inside a man’s low-cut athletic shoe.

U.S. authorities are working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to see whether there’s a connection to five feet that have washed ashore in British Columbia. Since August 2007, four men’s feet and a woman’s right foot have been found on Canadian beaches.

DNA testing linked one of the Canadian feet to a depressed man who went missing a year ago.

A sixth foot found in June in B.C. was determined to be an animal paw that had been shoved inside an athletic shoe as a hoax.