The body of Max Maisel, the missing son of ESPN sportswriter Ivan Maisel, was found in Lake Ontario this past weekend and positively identified on Monday, April 20, by the Rochester Police Department.
Maisel, 21, a photography student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, went missing this past February. Friends and family presumed Maisel was dead from a suspected suicide. He was last seen on the Charlotte Pier near his family's lake house in Rochester, N.Y., where he left his car parked.
Max's body was spotted by a fisherman on Friday at dusk, floating 200 yards away from a nearby Coast Guard station.
His family released a statement to Rochester's WROC on Monday, thanking authorities for giving them a sense of closure. "We knew this day would come, and we are relieved that it has. But it is merely the postscript to our sad story," the family said. "We have mourned Max from the night that the Rochester police called to tell us he was missing. There was no other plausible solution to the puzzle he left behind. Now we must get on with living with this hole in our lives. Death cannot take away the love we continue to have for our son and the love that our daughters have for their brother. Death will not rob us of that."
Grieving their son, his parents wrote of his innate goodness. "We have our memories of a sweet boy who grew into a sensitive, caring young man," they continued in their statement. "We have his photography, a record of the talent he had just begun to develop… And we have how desperately we miss him. That will not go away."
Last month, ESPN writer Ivan delivered a heart-wrenching eulogy at his son's memorial service. His words touched so many that he later shared the tribute via Medium.
"Max’s death has shone a light on the innate goodness in people, a quality that I am sure I didn’t appreciate until now," Ivan told the 900 attendees who packed the service in Bridgeport, Conn. "Eight years ago, [my wife Meg Murray] and I stood here and talked about Max, who on that day became a Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish threshold of adulthood. Today we are here again to talk about Max, who we presumed drowned on Feb. 22, shortly after he turned 21, the legal threshold of adulthood."
According to local police, the cause of Max's death still remains unclear. "In the end, we may never know what happened," his father said in his eulogy. "All we do know is that Max tried to leave the room — quietly."
