State Police: Identifying Southbury skeletal remains could take time
SOUTHBURY — It may be some time before the skeletal remains discovered this week in a wooded area near Berkshire Road are identified.
“It can be quite the process,” Trooper Sarah Salerno, spokeswoman for Connecticut State Police, said Wednesday.
Two days earlier, state police’s Western District Major Crime Squad announced that “human skeletal remains” had been found in a wooded area near Berkshire Road during a search for Mark Gasso, a Southbury man who has been missing since April.
A Silver Alert was issued for the 63-year-old on April 19, after a co-worker went to Gasso’s Berkshire Road residence to check on him after he failed to show up to work that day.
The co-worker told police Gasso was nowhere to be found, but his truck was in the driveway, the shower was on and his cell phone and wallet were also there, according to an investigation report.
At the residence, police said they found a small, dried red-colored stain on a mattress but “no apparent signs of a struggle inside the dwelling.”
A state police K-9 was brought in to search Gasso’s residence and the surrounding wooded area, but the track yielded no results. Police said another search was conducted the following day, but that also yielded no results.
Monday’s search was scheduled to take place because the lack of foliage provided enhanced visibility this time of year, according to Connecticut State Police’s Western District Major Crime Squad, who conducted the search with members of the State Police Emergency Services Search & Rescue K9 Unit and Dive Team, FBI Task Force officers, Southbury police and Naugatuck police detectives.
The unspecified human skeletal remains were found about 20 minutes into the search, which began at 9:30 a.m.
State police did not provide any information on where exactly the remains were located, but said the scene was processed by the Western District Major Crime Squad and the remains were transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for examination and identification.
Not only could it take a “significant amount of time to come up with an identification,” Salerno said, but it depends on what authorities have to work with in terms of the condition of the remains.
“If they have DNA to work with, they would have to get elimination DNA from relatives, family members,” she said. “Worst case, if there’s no DNA to work with, they’ll generally go to dental records from there.”
Connecticut State Police’s public information office did not have any details pertaining to the type or condition of the skeletal remains.
Salerno said the first step in the process is to have the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner conduct a thorough review
to make sure the remains are in fact human.
“We have certainly seen cases where it was not human, although it did look like it — but when OCME did the analysis, they (determined that it was not),” she said. “We always send it to be reviewed to be absolutely sure that it’s human.”
State police said the investigation into Gasso’s disappearance is ongoing.