Moore ran away from his home in Southern California at age 16, hitchhiking cross-country to Florida.
His family would wait for him for the next 24 years, wondering if he was just too scared to come home, or if he had settled down somewhere.
They never dared to move away or even change their phone number in the hopes that he might look for them.
As technology and social media developed, they searched for him with renewed hope on Google and Facebook.
Now, they are finally reunited, but it wasn't the outcome the family had hoped for.
"I think it's the beginning of the closure that at least now, we know that he's not out there in the desert someplace, or in the hills," his father, Joe Moore, said in an emotional news conference on Monday. "We know exactly where he's at and where he's going. To me, that would be better than me going to my grave and never knowing."
Moore died in June 1987, six months after he was reported missing. He was hitchhiking from Arizona to California -- his family believes he was coming home -- but died in a car crash on westbound Interstate 10 near Tonopah.
The only identification he had was on a duffel bag with his name misspelled -- authorities suspect that he might have changed it because he was a runaway or that the initial investigating officer wrote it down wrong.
Moore was buried amid hundreds of other nameless bodies at Maricopa County's Twin Butte Cemetery for the indigent, a gravel lot tucked away next to I-10 just south of Broadway Road in Tempe. A metal disc about the size of a coaster marked his grave as John Doe, case No. 87-1337.
In late 2010, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office received a federal grant to begin exhuming more than 200 sets of unidentified remains and use new technology and investigative techniques to solve their cases.
So far, they have identified 11 sets of remains out of the 40 they have investigated. They have partial sketches and causes of death for others.
The county project is one of many across the country that the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice funds. The Identify the Missing project focuses on unnamed bodies buried from 1950 to 1992. This spring, the county Medical Examiner's Office applied for another round of funding, which is expected to be announced soon.
Moore's case took nearly two years of intense cross-agency work, a team of dedicated investigators and some luck.
Investigators zeroed in on Moore's case, optimistic that they had enough leads to piece the puzzle together.
"He was a 16-year-old boy -- a boy who ran away from home. For us, this case has been painful because we all have children, and we know what it's like for someone to be missing," said Laura Fulginiti, a forensic anthropologist with the project.
There is minimal evidence available in most of the unidentified cases because burials were so long ago. It takes a wide-cast net and cooperation among several agencies, sometimes in different states, to make an identification.
Moore's fingerprints had initially been on file in California but for some reason were no longer in the system, leading to a lengthier search process, officials said. Detectives searched through a list of juveniles who were missing but no longer listed in the national missing-persons database. A search combining his age, demographics and characteristics yielded 30,000 results.
Moore's duffel bag also had a Florida address with it, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety's report on the accident. But, at the time, attempts to identify him with that information failed, county officials said.
This time, Detective Steve Leon, who recently left the agency, began with the address and searched for more leads, narrowing down potential matches.
When he found the most likely candidate, the team contacted Moore's family members.
The family offered DNA samples right away. They matched. Moore's brother identified the tattoo on his chest -- his parents didn't know Moore had gotten it.
"This has been extremely overwhelming," said Joella, Moore's older sister. "Some people might think that we've had 24 years to prepare ourselves for this. There is no preparation because you always have hope."
She recalled times she and her brother shared at home in California -- before the anger issues that troubled him and which, his family believes, ultimately drove him to run away.
"We grew up in a small little country town. We built forts with spoons, in alfalfa fields, and threw rocks at cars when they drove by," she said. "We were getting into all kinds of trouble. A typical kid, you know? A little country kid."
It has been a rough few weeks for the family. They imagine his last moments and potentially suffering at a hospital in a different state by himself, she said near tears.
The family wonders if they could have found answers earlier: If his name wasn't "Brian" on his duffel bag, or if they had searched for variations of his name. They wonder how they missed the various Arizona news stories that had been published about Moore after the new program began.
The Moores urged other families with missing members to keep information updated in the national database.
Joe Moore urged other families to keep contacting law enforcement, especially if information disappears or becomes outdated on national missing-persons databases. "Don't give up," Moore said.
Tuesday 9 October 2012
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/10/08/20121008arizona-john-doe-arizona-crash-identified-missing-teen.html?nclick_check=1#ixzz28n3wqOBo
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