Updated

The agonizing search for a missing college student has ended in heartbreak for the young man’s family.

Search teams from the Garden State Underwater Recovery Unit pulled Shane Montgomery’s body from the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia around noon Saturday, Fox 29 reported.

“Today we have done what we promised. We found and brought Shane home,“ the 21-year-old’s mother Karen Montogmery wrote on Facebook.

Shane, a 21-year-old senior at West Chester, had been out with friends until the early-morning hours of Thanksgiving and never made it home. His mother has said he was escorted out of Kildare's Irish Pub in the city's lively Manayunk neighborhood around 2 a.m.

For five weeks, family, friends, volunteer search crews, professional divers, police and the FBI scoured the area for clues to Shane’s disappearance.

Fox 29 said the biggest break came two weeks ago when investigators found Shane’s car keys near the river.

Surveillance video showed him heading towards a parking lot along the banks of the icy river.

“This is the last place we know he came,” Philadelphia Detective Capt. James Kelly told the station. “Nobody else followed him. He walked into the parking lot. If he came back here, there’s a lot of different ways he could have gone that wouldn’t have been picked up by a camera.”

The search for Shane generated numerous donations, funding a reward that climbed to over $65,000.

Last month, his mother spoke at the vigil of the family's frustration.

"The frustrating part is that there are no leads -- no one knows what happened to him," she said. "It's a nightmare I can't wake up from."

The Associated Press contributed to this report