The King County Sheriff’s Office and Medical Examiner’s Office are working to identify a body found in the woods behind Pandora’s Box Monday afternoon.

The body was found just after noon, and deputies remained at the scene past 2 p.m. According to those deputies, a person walking through the forest behind the pet supply business called to report the body of an adult man that had apparently been in the woods for at least a few weeks.

Pandora’s Box owner Cheryl Pruett said Tuesday that she was walking through the area behind her store with two Kimmco Inc. employees as part of her plan to clear some vegetation from the area. After talking with them about her plans, she headed back to the store. After a few moments, one of the Kimmco men found her to tell her about the discovery.

“His eyes were all big and he said, ‘I think you have a problem here,’” she said.

He told her that he had seen what he thought was a body in one of the trees. She grabbed her phone and returned to the area behind the store.

“He was out of the way. You wouldn’t have seen anything if you weren’t looking through the brush,” she said. “I called 911 and I was very calm, but the 911 operator definitely was not. They ask you, ‘What’s your emergency?’ And I said I wasn’t sure. I just said there was a human form … and I wasn’t sure if it was real or not.”

Deputies arrived at the scene shortly after Pruett’s call and took the body away. At the scene, they said that because of the amount of time that had passed between the person’s death and the body’s discovery, identification will “take a while.”

Pruett said deputies were running through mental lists of the island’s homeless population, but none have come up missing or matched the man’s description.

“It’s just sad,” Pruett said. “You just wonder how long that poor man sat there.”

The Beachcomber will publish an update to this story as details arise and when the body is identified. No further information was available as of Tuesday afternoon.