Pima County has more unidentified remains cases than almost any other county in the country. denelleconfair takes us inside the Pima County Medical Examiners Office with more than one thousand unidentified sets of remains.
TUCSON, Ariz. — Sitting at the Pima County Medical Examiners Office are the remains of more than one thousand unidentified people from the past 30 years.It's a mission close to Pima County Forensic Anthropologist Bruce Anderson's heart.
"So it can be extremely rewarding for us. Once we put a name on a skeleton, once we change John Doe to James Smith, then the family is notified," Anderson said."So our best day as forensic anthropologists, is probably the worst day for most families.""So we're hoping these genealogy studies which use a different part of the genome," Anderson said.
The first John Doe they hope to identify from Nogales. A Caucasian man who checked into a hotel under a false name in 2002. The second John Doe a Latin American who was found on Missouri Street in a Tucson dumpster in 2004. The third another Latin American who was found at Limberlost Park in 2008.
Gurney and his team set up a booth at this year's Festival of Books to try to gather even more genealogy samples in hopes of getting a better match. "Pima County has more unidentified remains cases than almost any other county in the country," Cairenn Binder, Director of Investigative Genetic Genealogy at Ramapo said."So it's really important to us to help out in any way we can to try to identify some of these remains.For more information on each of the John Does, visit ramapo.edu.Denelle Confair is an anchor and investigative reporter for KGUN 9. It's been her dream to tell your stories for the past decade.
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