Investigators may have a break in a high-profile missing person case after finding what they think are human remains buried at a Long Beach home, police announced Thursday.

Zach Kennedy, 32, has been missing since October 2017, according to police. On Thursday morning, detectives served a search warrant at a home in the 500 block of W. 8th Street, where he was last seen, Long Beach police spokesman Sgt. Brad Johnson said.

Detectives suspected Kennedy may have been buried there, so they started digging, he said.

“Not long after detectives began the excavation they located what they believe to be the remains of a human body buried on the property,” he said.

The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office is working to identify the body and determine a cause of death, according to police.

Kennedy was recently featured on NBC’s Dateline where Kennedy’s father, Jeff, said his son had moved to Long Beach from Pennsylvania years earlier.

Kennedy’s father told Dateline that his son disappeared on Oct. 22. Kennedy reportedly had dinner plans with a companion that night. He’d asked the man to pick him up at a friends house when he called, but that call never came, Dateline reported.

Neighbors along Eighth Street said fliers about Kennedy started appearing in the neighborhood a while after that. Some of the fliers singled out a particular home on the block, saying that was the last place Kennedy had been seen.

Police occasionally would visit that house too, said Sharon Savoy, who lives across the street. She sometimes saw their cars parked out front, but on Thursday morning, she woke up to detectives, coroner’s officials and a tent set up outside.

It appeared they were digging in the side yard.

“I just heard a hoe or a shovel banging on the ground,” she said.

Savoy said a single man lives in the house. Neighbors said he kept to himself. She called him “a recluse.”

“Once in a while, he’d come out and mow the lawn,” Savoy said.

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Neighbors said crews weren’t at the home for long Thursday morning, only from about 8 a.m. to noon, they estimated. Police had blocked off the street while they dug, but other than a small pile of dirt on the home’s lawn that afternoon, there was nothing to suggest they’d been there.

Police said they have not arrested anyone in connection with the case and declined to provide any more details.

William Lykins, who lives next-door, said the detectives working the scene had interviewed him about the case in the past. When Lykins went outside to ask one of them what was going on, he said, he got a simple answer.

“She said, ‘We found something.’”