VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla – Two cold or missing people cases in Volusia County could be cracked soon.
The county’s medical examiner just received a grant from the FDLE to submit the DNA for next generation testing that could provide a better idea of who the unidentified remains belong to.
Right now, there are 23 unidentified people in the county medical examiner’s custody.
“These cases range from 1972 all the way into the 2000s,” said Volusia County Medical Examiner James Fulcher. “It’s a great day for our office because these are cases where quite frankly, forensic science failed these people in 1972 or 1980 or whatever time period before this advancement in technology.”
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Fulcher said they followed the grant’s criteria to choose the two unidentified people they would submit for testing. Part of that was that all avenues to identify them had to be exhausted.
“We had four decedents that qualified and then two of those we were able to get the process started,” Fulcher said.
He said the $30,000 grant will help them cover the two people’s testing which can cost about $10,000 minimum for each unidentified person.
“This grant allows the next generation genetic testing of these decedents’ remains which will then be back compared in genetic genealogy fashion to a common relative who basically submitted their DNA to 23andMe or some other genetic repository,” he said.
Forensic Investigator Madison Worley said it can take three months to a year to get results back.
“It depends on what family members are in the database and how quickly they can extract DNA to do a comparison,” Worley said.
Regardless of when, it will be an answer for law enforcement and the family of someone who went missing or was killed.
“There’s nothing better than being able to have that conversation with a family member. Even if it’s not necessarily the conversation they want to have, it provides an answer to a question that they’ve been asking themselves and asking law enforcement for a very long time,” Worley said.
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