Some were crime victims. Others lived and died in solitude. Some may have been lost hikers, runaway children, or wanderers.
One thing connects the 58 or so remains at the Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office found with no identification card and no next of kin to claim them: They remain nameless.
The five cases sent to Othram for testing were chosen in part because they are juveniles, who DNA experts felt had a good chance being identified through advanced technology. One case is connected to a 2014 homicide so the Honolulu Medical Examiners Office declined to provide information while the investigation continues.
, an organization funded by the National Institute of Justice that runs a national database of unidentified, missing and unclaimed persons. Representatives with NamUs did not respond to interview requests.For the skeletal remains found inside the vase in Honolulu, for example, forensic pathologists could not identify an age range, gender, height, weight or year of death — only that the person was still an adolescent.
The method became popular in criminal investigations in the 2010s after companies like 23andMe and Ancestry came onto the market. Those companies block law enforcement agencies like the FBI from their databases, but investigators can use others, like GEDMatch, which is public facing, and FamilyTreeDNA, which allows limited access by law enforcement, according to Stephen Kramer, a former FBI in-house counsel and founder of Indago Solutions, a DNA identification company.
He used records to identify people with this ancestry who had moved to Hawaii and married into Filipino families, leaving very few potential matches. He traced a family tree with three Filipino grandparents and one grandparent descending from Europeans, Scandinavians and Pacific Islanders.Investigators followed Lauro, picking up a fork he discarded, which was tested against a DNA sample from Ireland’s body.
Many are skeletal remains uncovered at construction sites, Carter said. Others are remains discovered by hikers that likely belonged to people who were homeless and living in encampments in remote parts of the island. A few people have come forward thinking they knew her, but her identity wasn’t able to be confirmed, Carter said.
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