Technology could help give names to 2 bodies
They are ghosts of lives lost, all-but-forgotten whispers of barely noticed deaths.
Pulled from the Scioto River a decade ago, the two males are buried but have no headstones — because they have yet to be identified.
And the attempt to put names to the two unidentified bodies has stalled. "They've kind of grown stale," Matt Caudill said of the cases.
Caudill is director of operations for the Franklin County
coroner’s office, which is responsible for collecting bodies, identifying them and determining what caused their deaths.
His office has worked for years with law enforcement to try to identify the two men, who were found dead a year apart, hoping to contact their families and perhaps give them some closure.
“We’re looking at ways to raise awareness of these cases that remain unidentified,” Caudill said. “There are very, very few” such cases.
The coroner’s office has four such bodies, but two have been tentatively identified.
Little is known about the other two:
The decomposed body of John Doe 06- 1082 was found March 30, 2006, in the Scioto River near High Street and Williams Road on the South Side.
Officials think he died in December 2005. The brown- haired man was between 30 and 50 years old, and was wearing Converse brand socks. He was between 5 feet 6 inches and 6 feet tall and had poor dental hygiene, a healed collarbone fracture and a poorly healed fracture of the right cheek. Officials are unsure of the cause or manner of death. A homicide detective was assigned to the case, but police say the man also could have drowned.
John Doe 07- 1801 was dead several weeks before his body was pulled from the Scioto River on May 30, 2007, off Dublin Road near the Columbus Dublin Road Water Treatment Facility. He likely drowned.
The black- haired, white or Latino male was 25 to 40 years old, weighed 125 to 145 pounds and was between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall.
He was wearing size 8 women’s pants; a gray, button- up, long- sleeve shirt; and one brown shoe with the brand name Earth Shoe.
The coroner usually uses fingerprints and dental records to compare a body with missing-persons records.
That was done in these cases, but “we didn’t get a hit,” said Amanda Alvarez, the coroner’s chief of investigations and morgue operations.
Frustrated police also couldn’t identify the men.
“I don’t want to close these cases,” said Columbus Police Homicide Sgt. Dave Sicilian. “Before we really want to close the case, we’d want to notify the next of kin.
“I don’t know how we’re going to identify them.”
Technology, Sicilian hopes, will give the men names.
DNA from both bodies was submitted to the Ohio attorney general’s Project LINK, or Linking Individuals Not Known. LINK compares DNA from unidentified bodies with that from missing persons, provided by the missing person’s relatives or from the missing person’s toothbrush or hairbrush.
DNA gathered for LINK is used only to help identify missing persons, attorney general spokeswoman Jill Del Greco said.
The LINK database now has 90 unidentified remains, dating from 1969, that can be compared to DNA provided by families looking for lost relatives.
It also can be compared to the 964 missing- persons cases — 747 children and 217 adults — that LINK has in another database.
Since LINK started in 1999, it has helped identify at least 30 people. Two years ago, LINK identified Cheryl Wilson of Toledo from skeletal remains found in Holmes County in 2008, after Wilson’s family members submitted their DNA six months earlier to be included in the LINK database.
Columbus- based researchers announced a victory recently that might fulfill Sicilian’s belief that the bodies, and others in the same situation, ultimately will be identified using new technology.
“I think it is a big step ... a significant improvement,” said Mark Wilson, research leader in Applied Genomics for Battelle.
Battelle, the world’s biggest nonprofit research and development agency, announced the findings of a two- year project for the National Institute of Justice.
That study sought to determine whether a newer technology called Massively Parallel Sequencing, or MPS, could produce the same findings in the lab of testing done now on DNA. It does. MPS can be relied on for the same accuracy as current DNA testing but it is much more powerful, providing massive amounts of additional data.
Wilson said that current DNA testing uses 25 to 27 genetic “markers” used to identify individuals. The new test will use 100 to 150 markers.
With MPS less DNA is needed, even from poor sources such as weathered bones or old hair shafts, to conclude whether the DNA matches.
MPS “provides the accuracy, reproducibility and sensitivity needed to support forensic investigation,” Wilson said. “It vastly increases the speed, processing power and resolution of DNA sequencing.
“The promise is there, but needs to be fully developed,” Wilson said.