Articles
FBI adds uses for its DNA database
The FBI plans to use its national DNA database system to help identify not only criminals, but also missing persons, and tens of thousands of unidentified bodies held by local coroners and medical examiners
Read More...Enlisting a Posse of Scientists
A Mammoth officer goes online for help solving a murder. His use of anthropologists and other academics is deemed 'cutting-edge.'
Read More...In Attics and Rubble, More Bodies, and Questions
The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans; in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged into piles of rubble, dangling from the rafters or lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors. Many of them, like Ms. Blanchard, were overloaded in initial searches...
FEMA declined to allow the New Orleans coroner, whose own office and morgue were ruined in the storm, to continue to use the autopsy site.
Read More...Investigators Hope to Identify 2,688 bodies
"More than 2,500 bodies - the victims of violent crime and suspicious circumstance - remain nameless entities in California, according to the state's Department of Justice. Some of the cases date back to the 1960's.At the Contra Costa County morgue in Martinez, Deputy Coroner Christopher Forsyth is working to identify the remains of 25 people..."
Read More...Gone But Not Forgotten
Las Vegas Coroner Mike Murphy's Cold Case Unit blends old-school detective work with digital savy.
Read More...The Search for Katrina's Victims Finds Some Missing by Choice
Hundreds of people were sucked into the Gulf of Mexico by Katrina's retreating tsunami-like storm surge and will never be found. But the state-run, federally funded Find Family National Call Center is discovering that hundreds of others have used the storm and the nationwide diaspora it triggered to escape a troubled painful past. The do not wish to be found.
Read More...Giving Names to the Forgotten Dead
...Like so many others in Tarrant County, Morgan lived and died alone. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office had 263 cases of unidentified bodies in 2005, about 10 percent of its total cases.
Some of the unidentified were burn and accident victims, but about half were like Morgan-people whose deaths went unnoticed until their decomposed bodies became unrecognizable. Only two bodies in the past two years were never identified."It's a sad fact of life," said Dr. Roger Metcalf of the medical examiner's human identification lab and its chief forensic dentist. "Nobodies checking on them"...
Read More...Volunteers find names for dead
Doe Network members scour the Web to match found bodies with missing persons.
Read More...Court Documents: Hospital Gave Lethal Injections to Patients During Hurricane Katrina Just after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans rumors circulated that at least one hospital had euthanized patients during the mayhem.
...documents, say NPR "reveal chilling details about events at Memorial Hospital in the chaotic days following the storm, including hospital administrators who saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses."
Read More...Women Called Hero in Sex Abuse Cases
"A man and woman are in police custody in the possible sexual abuse of a girl toddler and teenage boy thanks, authorities say, to the diligence of a Decatur, GA., woman who continued to insist that authorities look into the case.
...Haunted by the girl's eyes, Dean did some Internet checking for missing and exploited children and found a girl in Ohio who resembled the child.
Read More...How ID'ing Texas Remains Could Aid Philadelphia
The skeleton was kept at the medical examiner's office until a visiting fire inspector declared the bones a bio-hazard, and ordered them destroyed. Instead, one of the nurses hid them in a box and stuck it under a cabinet in a storage area. "She just said, "We're not getting rid of these, and she kept every bone we recovered," Cole said. Thanks to one stubborn nurse- plus dedicated investigators and the relentless growth of technology - those bones eventually gave up their identity- but i took another 10 years."
Read More...Florida Police to Share Data with other States
Florida Law Enforcement agencies participating in a 2-year-old information-sharing project will have access to a much larger world of data. The Florida Integrated Network for Data Exchange and Retrieval (FINDER) system enables investigators and officers to query databases from participating agencies to get leads on cases.
Read More...Anonymity of Death Echoes Life For Undocumented Latino Immigrants
Law Enforcement Officials are seeing an increasing number of indentifieds from a new group: Hispanic immigrants. Many don't carrt identification, and, if they do, the name is often false. When a real name does surface, investigators say other hurdles await: no fingerprints on file, no school records, no dental history, and sometimes, no one wanting to claim them, or someone too afraid to.
Read More...Maryland Task Force for the Missing and Unidentified collect DNA Reference Samples
A Task force formed by relatives of 57 people reported missing in Maryland sponsored an event inn Annapolis. Saliva samples will be collected and sent to the University of North Texas for DNA testing.
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U.S. authorities have about 14,000 sets of human remains lacking identification
In a report due out today, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics says the backlog of unidentified remains grows by about 1,000 each year.
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Science makes identifying remains easier
A federal grant that began in 2002 allows the University of North Texas to offer free DNA tests to any coroner, medical examiner, law enforcement agency or other public authority that submits unidentified remains, with the results uploaded to the FBI index. The
college has distributed more than 10,000 DNA collection kits but has received fewer than 2,000 test requests, Eisenberg says.
Read More...800 unidentified dead in L.A. County
At least 800 bodies examined by the Los Angeles County coroner since 1968 remain unidentified, according to a federal report released this week.
Kristen Hughes, a Justice Department statistician and coauthor of the report, said California had two counties in the top five because it is the only state that legally mandates coroners' and medical examiners' offices to report their unidentified deceased.
Read More...Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains: The Nation's Silent Mass Disaster
If you ask most Americans about a mass disaster, they’re likely to think of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or the Southeast Asian tsunami. Very few people—including law enforcement officials—would think of the number of missing persons and unidentified human remains in our Nation as a crisis. It is, however, what experts call “a mass disaster over time.”
Read More...The Challenge: Identify The Dead
Hillsborough County Medical Examiner Pete Bihorel has more than 50 cold case files on unidentified human remains on which he spends 10 to 20 hours a week, as he has for the past three years.
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