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Authorities ID body found on east Forsyth Lake Lanier shore Thursday
sheriff

EAST FORSYTH — The body that washed up from Lake Lanier on the shore of Sawnee Park campground Thursday night has been identified as a 50-year-old woman from Lawrenceville, authorities said.

According to Epifanio Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, Charlotte Ann Church was found by passers-by, who alerted 911 about 6 p.m.

No signs of trauma or foul play were present on the body, Rodriguez said, though a cause of death remains pending and the investigation is ongoing.

Drugs or alcohol were not immediately thought to be involved.

It has not been determined when Church died or for how long the body had been in the water, Rodriguez said. The incident was not treated as a rescue, though, as it was clear she was dead.

Robin Regan, also a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said the agency responded to the campground, which sits just north of the Chattahoochee River off Buford Dam Road. Assisting were Forsyth County firefighters and EMS personnel, the Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the area around Buford Dam.

The body was the second recovered from the lake this season, and at least the third from local waterways since May.

On June 8, a 20-year-old Braselton man died at Northside Hospital-Forsyth, where he had been taken after being pulled from Lanier at Shady Grove Campground.

Witnesses at the park said he was in a group of four swimmers when he began to yell for help and disappeared under water.

On May 23, fisherman found the body of a 61-year-old Lawrenceville man submerged in the Chattahoochee River below the dam. Authorities have said it appeared he fell from a boat and drowned.