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Coroners Get Help Identifying Old Bodies
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[July 07, 2007]
HOUSTON
(AP) -- The fully clothed corpse lay face down, floating in a swirl of water where the south bank of Buffalo Bayou runs through downtown Houston. The year was 1957 and the young man's body was deemed too decomposed for an autopsy. He received a pauper's burial in unmarked Grave 5 in a county-owned cemetery. Two years later, the now-defunct Houston Press newspaper published a story headlined "Who Is The Man In Grave 5 In Potter's Field?"
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 Now, there is more hope the man can still be identified thanks to a federal grant and investigators with the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office. A series of grants from the National Institute of Justice allows medical examiners and coroners around the country to submit _ or resubmit _ remains, tissue and fingerprints for identification and determine causes of death.
Mary Daniels, director of operations for Harris County's medical examiner's office, has 421 cases in which human remains are in need of identification.
"We do know it's important to do everything we can to identify all of these cases, and that's why we have a special unit in place," she said.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth has been designated as one of only three laboratories in the nation authorized to perform free DNA testing for law-enforcement agencies and medical examiner's offices around the country.
The university's Center for Human Identification has received several million dollars worth of National Institute of Justice grants since beginning the work in 2004. The federal grants allow the center to do its work for free, according to program coordinator George Adams.
Daniels said her office, which opened in 1957, has many cases in which the bodies were buried long ago, but tissue and organs can be stored in hopes they might later help identify their owner.
She said the office has begun reviewing and identifying cases that can be sent to national databases or to the center at the University of North Texas Health.
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 Success could elude the man buried in Grave No. 5 back in 1957. Officials know only that he was a white man between 25 and 30 years old with no obvious jaw or skull fractures. He wore dentures complete with a serial number, but that number has revealed nothing so far.
Investigators need a possible relative to come forward and provide a DNA sample for comparison. With no DNA or other material to compare, there is little that technology has to offer. Jennifer Love, the Harris County Medical Examiner's office's director of forensic anthropology, said if someone hears about the case and suspects the man may be a relative, the office can send that person's DNA to UNT for a match with the body.
Harris County officials have had some success, however, in the case of a 47-year-old Hispanic man shot to death in 1982 and left on a remote roadside. By the time his body was found, it was already moderately decomposed, and fingerprint and other identification attempts failed.
As part of their review, morgue officials recently resubmitted the man's fingerprints to the FBI, which was able to identify him because of advances in fingerprint identification. With the man's identity in hand, morgue officials were able to track down his ex-wife and direct her to the county cemetery in which he had been buried.
"There's a lot of satisfaction in that," said Love. "Getting unidentified individuals identified is definitely rewarding to us. We're passionate about not burying people as unidentified."
[Associated Press
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By JOE STINEBAKER] |
