Retrieved from a well in Oglethorpe County, the body of Charles Stephen Parker was sent to the State Crime Lab on Monday evening. Officials will conduct an autopsy to determine when, and how, the 25-year-old assistant bank manager from Monroe was killed.

He was last seen alive in Athens on January 15. His family said after church on that Sunday, he headed east to Madison County to look at land for a business venture. Someone saw him later that afternoon, but the Parker family never heard from him again.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is handling the case, is treating Parker’s death as a homicide, said Jim Fullington, special agent in charge of the Athens field office of the GBI.

He wouldn’t offer any details about what was found on Parker’s body or whether the man had been shot or stabbed.

“All I can say about the body is that it was partially decomposed,” said Fullington. Even in that state, “we could get enough details from the body to determine that it was that of Charles Parker.”

Someone in Oglethorpe County—Fullington wasn’t sure who that was---found Parker’s body in a board well, which averages 50 to 60 feet deep. The well was next to an abandoned house on the highway in the Sandy Cross Community.

The house “was like any abandoned house,” Fullington said, and was about ¼ mile to ½ mile from another house. From the abandoned house, no other house could be seen, “so it was really rural,” Fullington said.

He praised the Athens Clarke County Fire Department and the Search and Rescue Team, who brought trucks and equipment to retrieve Parker’s body, even though it was in Oglethorpe County.

Fullington also said anyone with any information about Charles Steven Parker should contact GBI agent Rebecca Shaw at 706-552-2309.