A body found Friday morning in the Moonridge area of Big Bear Lake was that of missing Santee man Bryson Lukacik, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.
The 22-year-old disappeared in Big Bear over the Thanksgiving weekend while staying with his father, Joe Lukacik, and his father's girlfriend in a vacation cabin on Balsam Drive at Big Bear Lake.
Lukacik fell from a chairlift and hit his head while snowboarding but didn’t tell his family until later. He also told his dad “I need my car keys. I gotta go to work,” and talked about surfing.
“He said, we’ve got to get going, where's my bed. Then, at that point, I knew that something was wrong," Joe Lukacik said.
His son wandered out of the cabin overnight and his family wasn’t able to find him.
On Friday, Dec. 3, around 9 a.m., a maintenance man out snowplowing called in the discovery of a body in the yard of a vacation rental partially covered by several inches of snow.
The coroner arrived and positively identified the body as that of Bryson Lukacik.
Bryson Lukacik was found just a couple of streets from the cabin his family was staying in, according to the sheriff's department public information officer. In addition to the snow covering the body, it was also found in a very shady portion of the property, deputies said.