Police release color images of unidentified boy ‘Little Zion’ found dead near Nevada hiking trail

Police hope the new images will help identify the boy, who was found dead of a homicide in Mountain Springs, Nevada

Las Vegas police have released these images of John ‘Little Zion’ Doe, a boy found dead near a Nevada hiking trail (LVMPD)

Las Vegas police have released lifelike, color images of what they believe a young boy found dead near a hiking trail might have looked like while he was alive.

The body of the young boy, who police are calling John “Little Zion” Doe, was found in Mountain Springs, Nevada on 28 May. Police say he died of a homicide.

Police hope the new pictures, developed by forensic artists at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, will help them figure out who he was and who killed him.

“LVMPD and the FBI are working together to help ID the young homicide victim from May 28,” the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department tweeted on Thursday, along with the new images. “The FBI is offering a $10K reward for info leading to his ID.”

The new renderings show the boy’s face from the front and the side, in full color. The LVMPD had previously posted a single, black-and-white image of the boy.

“Going from only having black and white photos to getting more high-resolution color photographs – and then pictures of the child’s teeth, in this specific case – was a game changer for me,” Colin McNally, the supervisor of the team that developed the portraits, told KVVU-TV.

“These images are really important, to make sure we’re capturing what this child would’ve looked like.”

Police believe the boy was between eight and ten years old. He was 4’11 and 123 pounds, and was Hispanic, with black hair and brown eyes.

After the LVMPD released its earlier, black-and-white image of the boy, a distraught mother identified him as her son. But she had made a mistake – her two sons, it turned out, were on a camping trip with their father in Utah, where they had poor cell phone reception.

Police urge anyone with information on the boy to call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov.