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K&R News

2016-06-20 | Advanced DNA Could I.D. Thousands of Unknowns in Kosovo
Beyond the dead, the year-long war in Kosovo left an estimated 4,500 missing in the tiny country. Some 1,700 remain unaccounted for today. Almost all the missing are almost certainly dead, hidden amid the mounds of skeletal remains collected in the wake of the rebellion.

2016-06-13 | Forensic Scientist Helps Vietnamese Counterparts Identify Wartime Remains
"The U.S. solved a lot of cases," Coble said, including many that became solvable only in the last decade as research led to powerful new techniques for analyzing DNA. "But the Vietnamese are at the beginning of the process." That process is likely to be a long one. The war left 300,000 Vietnamese unaccounted for, their remains either missing or unidentified. That process will also be a very personal one. "Many of the scientists who participated in the workshop were children during the war, and they and their families experienced it firsthand," Coble said.

2016-04-28 | Decade after funeral, woman presumed dead talks about mistaken ID
But in the chaos of the devastating wreck, medics attached the ID of another student, 22-year-old Laura Van Ryn, to her bandaged body, the Indianapolis Star reported. The switch meant Van Ryn’s family stood by Cerak’s bedside for five weeks, believing the blonde in a coma was their Laura. Meanwhile, the Ceraks held a funeral for their daughter, not knowing they were actually burying Van Ryn.

2016-03-24 | New Standards for Identifying Remains with X-Ray Imaging
Based on “concordant areas”—the areas that positively match in both the ante-mortem and postmortem X-rays—the different locations came back with different rates for positive identification. The most definitive locations were the skull and spine, 97 and 98 percent respectively, with misclassification rates of 10 and 7 percent. The lower back performed much worse: as low as 40 percent misclassification rate, according to the study.

2016-03-21 | "Old method re-invented" - Use footprints to identify disaster victims, say Japanese investigators
Two former detectives from the Tokyo metropolitan police department say the ridge patterns on the soles of a person’s feet are a more reliable means of identification in natural disasters, as victims are sometimes found with badly damaged or missing digits.

2016-02-24 | Authorities Reveal DNA Identification Process for Bodies Found in Brooks Co.
The only way to recover a family member’s DNA is by a police officer. “Ultimately you’re looking for a DNA sample to be taken from those remains, and then collected from a family DNA reference sample that’s collected from the family,” Strand said. The South Texas Human Rights Center has files open on 230 missing people.

2015-12-18 | Union, W Cape health dept in fight over dead bodies
The union has accused the Western Cape health department of forcing unqualified staff members to perform autopsies. In an ongoing stand-off over the signing off on autopsies, Hospersa believed that pathology officers were not qualified forensic pathologists and should not be performing unsupervised autopsies. The health department, however, said their jobs included assisting the forensic pathologists with getting autopsies started if and when necessary. This has left staff disgruntled.

2015-08-29 | Technology a vital tool in identifying remains
“So we’re able to match forensically the dental information of missing persons against unidentified bodies. We’re the only province in Canada right now that’s doing that,” Risling said. “The system that was settled on was a system called Plass Data DVI. Plass is a disaster-victim identification software that is utilized by INTERPOL. It was utilized in Thailand following the tsunami in 2005. It proved to be an effective method of cataloguing dental information in order to perform dental comparisons with the goal of ultimately obtaining the identification of various unidentified victims.”

2015-08-10 | The Mass Grave In Texas No One Talks About
"We have a mass grave in the United States. A mass grave, which we usually equate to countries with war and huge human-rights violations," Frey says. Martinez told Refinery29, "We no longer bury any [migrant] bodies here in Brooks County since August 2013." Instead, the bodies are sent directly to Texas State University forensic teams to be identified.

2015-07-14 | FBI software sped up identifying factory fire victims
The DNA-based identification process for the dead in the Kentex fire may be considered “one of the fastest in Philippine history,” according to Deputy Director Emmanuel Aranas of the Philippine National Police Crime Laboratory.