On a winter’s night in early 2004, after a late visit at his parents’ house near Cleveland, Javier Reveron called his mother to let her know he had driven home safely. Then he vanished.
Javier Reveron, who went missing in 2004, shown with his mother, Judy, in 2000. He is among those whose bodies have been identified using expertise gained from a decade of using DNA to identify victims of the World Trade Center attack.
Evidence would point to New York. A plane ticket was bought and used. A car parked near La Guardia Airport was broken into, and some of Mr. Reveron’s belongings were found: his wallet, a driver’s license, business cards and a banana peel. There would be sightings, most likely false, in places like Queens and Ohio. Then the trail went dry.
But about six years after his disappearance, the New York City medical examiner’s office discovered what became of Mr. Reveron.
The office is undertaking an ambitious effort to identify the nameless dead in the city’s potter’s field, seeking to capitalize on the expertise that it gained over the last decade identifying remains from the World Trade Center attack.
Through old-time detective work and newer DNA technology, the office established that Mr. Reveron, 27, had drowned not long after arriving in New York in early 2004, and that his body was buried on Hart Island, home to the potter’s field, the graveyard of the poor, unclaimed and, in rare cases, the unidentified.
Some 980 bodies have been found in the city, or its waterways, since 1990 whose identities have never been determined. After a month or more in one of the city’s morgues, the unidentified victims are generally sent to be buried in the same trench graves on Hart Island as the indigents.
But now, as the medical examiner’s office conducts a systematic review of its old cases, the office is not only reopening dormant case files; it is also opening old graves.
Since 2010, the city has exhumed 54 bodies from the potter’s field for further study. So far, the effort has led to about 50 identifications, mostly through DNA evidence.
In the case of Mr. Reveron, his parents, Rigoberto and Judith, came to New York to try to find their son. They handed out fliers and visited store owners who thought they may have seen him. When friends visited New York, the Reverons would give them more fliers to distribute.
“All to no avail,” Rigoberto Reveron said via telephone from his home in Lorain, Ohio. “We didn’t know he had already been buried.”
In March 2010, Mr. Reveron filled out an electronic form concerning missing and unidentified people. Within a few days, he got a call from Ben Figura, the director of identification at the medical examiner’s office, who said, “I personally want to get involved and help you find him.”
The medical examiner’s office got critical biographical information about Mr. Reveron’s son: He was a high school and college wrestler who after college was found to be bipolar. He had an appendectomy, had donated a kidney to his older brother and had the scars from both operations.
That information, Mr. Reveron said, matched “a John Doe buried on Hart Island.” The match was then confirmed by DNA, using an autopsy sample and DNA taken from the parents.
“In April 6, 2010, our chief of police and pastor of our church came looking for my wife and I to tell us a positive match had been made,” Mr. Reveron said. “Six years later.”
The medical examiner’s office declined to discuss any case in which an identification had been made, citing privacy concerns. But the cases, according to a person familiar with the identification process, have also included Sean Wheeler, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who disappeared in late 2003 after a car accident on the Henry Hudson Parkway. His body was found about three months later, floating in the Hudson River by a ferry captain, but it was not until 2010 that a match was made.
Mr. Wheeler’s relatives said they had been in touch with the medical examiner’s office in early 2004, so it was somewhat frustrating to have had to wait so long for an affirmative match. The confirmation of Mr. Wheeler’s death “was very depressing,” an aunt, Kimberly Wheeler, of Independence, Mo., said. “It shouldn’t have taken so long if they’d put any effort into it.”
Another aunt, Carol Wheeler, said that the initial match was based on his appearance, height and weight, and a distinctive fraternity brand on Mr. Wheeler’s arm, and that it was confirmed by DNA testing of his aunts and uncles. “We came to the conclusion that New York was a big city and a lot of people go missing,” she said. “As time went on, you know, it became a cold case.”
Not all of these nameless dead perished unnoticed. The unknown cases include several Chinese immigrants who drowned after the Golden Venture ran aground off Queens in 1993. The episode drew extensive news coverage and shed light on the brutal conditions and deprivations that some Asian immigrants endured to make it to New York.
Another old case that has attracted the attention of the medical examiner’s office is that of “Baby Hope.”
The young girl, about 5 years old, has been known as Baby Hope since shortly after her body was discovered packed into a picnic cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991.
As the subject of an active homicide investigation, her body was exhumed in 2007 from St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx even before the medical examiner’s office had begun looking into all of its old unknown cases. But at the time, biologists were unable to extract any DNA because her bones were in such poor condition.
“She had been in a cooler in the sun, and her bones were very brittle,” said Sheila Estacio Dennis, an assistant director in the medical examiner’s department of forensic biology.
By 2011, because of advances in the medical examiner’s office in the DNA extraction process, Ms. Dennis said, the office was able to obtain a full DNA profile. It did not yield a match to existing DNA databases from convicted felons or from active missing person cases in which samples had been collected.
Investigators believe that her parents, or one of them, most likely murdered her, as no one has come forward to identify the girl as his or her child.
In reviewing hundreds of old cases, the medical examiner’s office has in effect been conducting a census of “the unknowns,” as Mr. Figura calls them.
The deceased are overwhelmingly male, typically white and often homeless. They are usually found in Manhattan. The sidewalk is a common deathbed, as are subway platforms, where 106 of the unknowns — or 11 percent — were found.
Some 15 percent are presumed homicide victims. About 22 percent of the unknowns are pulled from the water, and investigators presume that many are suicides.
In most of the older cases, the medical examiner’s office typically keeps a tissue sample from the autopsy, which has been used to extract DNA samples in numerous instances over the last three years. In cases without an autopsy sample, the medical examiner’s office has sought to exhume the body.
Fingerprints have also led to identifications in a few cases, as improvements have been made in the sensitivity of the software that compares uploaded prints to various databases. Simply running the prints again years later has resulted in several identifications, Mr. Figura said.
Central to the medical examiner’s efforts is a public database, called Namus, containing information on 7,645 missing person cases and the remains of 8,516 unidentified victims. The database has helped investigators, the relatives of missing persons and even amateur sleuths try to establish matches between the known missing persons cases and the unidentified.
Mr. Reveron’s father, an usher for the Cleveland Indians and a former city councilman in Lorain, followed Mr. Figura’s instructions to use Namus to give a fuller profile of his missing son.
When the identification was confirmed, the Reverons requested that their son’s remains be returned. They learned that Javier’s body had been disinterred before, when investigators suspected that he might have been a match with someone else. When the match came up negative, his body was reburied on Hart Island.
The Reverons decided to cremate the remains in New York, and then took the ashes back to Ohio. On June 19, 2010, the Reverons gave their son “a Catholic Mass and a proper Christian burial,” Mr. Reveron said.
He said the family was grateful to Mr. Figura, saying that without his “personal involvement, we’d still be searching.”
But, he added, “What happened in six years should’ve only happened in one year.”
Thursday 9 August 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/nyregion/medical-examiner-opens-old-cases-and-graves-to-identify-dead.html?pagewanted=all
0 comments:
Post a Comment