The technology that helps police solve crimes and lets wrongly convicted inmates prove their innocence should be put to more use helping families bury their dead, according to an Arkansas woman searching for a brother who has been missing for 32 years.
Over the years, 41-year-old Laura Hood has emboldened herself to stop strangers to ask them if they know anything about Tony Allen. On a dark road one night in the 1980s, a man's gait looked familiar and she pulled over to ask the stranger his name.
"I just had to hear his voice and so I would know," Hood said.
She's still looking.
The United States lacks a standardized method of identifying bodies recovered by local law enforcement agenies ? who aren't required to report their finds to any central database.
"I mean, these people had names," Hood said. "They laughed, they cried, they had birthdays. They celebrated Christmas at some point in their lives. And somebody loves them and wants to know where they are."
Informal networks on the Internet have helped solve some cases, but without a central collection point for DNA samples taken from the dead and other identifying information, there is little hope for families seeking missing loved ones.
With scores of victims still unidentified after Hurricane Katrina, Hood hopes that more attention and resources will be devoted to identifying bodies. Hood accepts the possibility that Allen is dead, but says she must work to make sure.
Hood wants information on all unidentified bodies and missing persons to be reported to the National Crime Information Center. She also believes DNA should be extracted from unidentified bodies and relatives of the missing, then entered into a central database.
Some government officials agree.
Model state legislation drafted in August by a Department of Justice task force on missing persons calls for many ideas similar to Hood's. The federal government has started a five-year, $1 billion initiative to log more DNA information and improve forensic testing.
Allen disappeared in 1973 after apparently traveling to Oklahoma with friends. Hood said the circumstances were never fully explained.
"He pretty much wanted to do his own thing, that's for sure," she said. "And in that day and age, a lot of 16-year-old boys did their own thing."
Police in Fort Smith viewed him as a runaway, and years passed. The search started again in earnest a few years ago when family members began using Internet resources and contacted the Fort Smith police department. They found that Allen's missing persons report was no longer active ? the records had been stored in a warehouse destroyed by a 1996 tornado.
The case was reopened and Allen is now entered in the NCIC database as a missing person. Fort Smith Police Sgt. Adam Holland has investigated the case, but has found little. He's still hoping for a breakthrough ? "just that one person that's going to have something."
Hood recently spent months waiting for the results of DNA tests for the body of a young murder victim found in Texas who had the tall, thin build of her brother.
It can be difficult to solve cases in which a body is found in an area where the person didn't live. The FBI encourages agencies to file reports to aid communication in other parts of the country, but they aren't required to do so.
FBI officials said there were 5,955 unidentified bodies on file as of Nov. 2, compared with 110,460 people listed in the missing persons file. Roy Weise, an FBI official who works with the NCIC database, said he believes most missing persons are reported to the file ? it's a different story when it comes to unidentified bodies.
The FBI wouldn't release state-by-state numbers of unidentified bodies but Weise said California, which must report bodies to the database under state law, likely reported the largest share.
Federal guidelines are also loose for who must be reported as a missing person. Weise said only those under age 21 must be listed.
The model legislation proposed by the Department of Justice task force would require family members to submit DNA samples to local, state and national databases if a missing person is not found within 30 days. It would require agencies to report missing persons and unidentified bodies to the NCIC and prevent the disposal of bodies before taking DNA samples.
Weise cautions that even if all missing persons and unidentified bodies were reported to a central database, it would still be hard to identify the bodies. The system generates numerous false-positive matches and it's up to local agencies to sorting it all out, he said.
Some of the work of identifying bodies falls to volunteers like Todd Matthews of Livingston, Tenn. In 1998, Matthews matched an Internet missing persons report to the body of a woman known as the "Tent Girl," whose body was found in a canvas tent tube near Georgetown, Ky. DNA tests confirmed that she was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, who disappeared in Lexington, Ky., in 1967 at age 24.
Matthews is involved in the Doe Network, a volunteer Web site that posts facial reconstructions of unidentified bodies and case files of missing persons. Like Hood, he'd like to see a mandate that all reports of bodies and missing persons be entered into the NCIC database.
"If you don't have all the pieces of the puzzle, obviously you're not going to put together a complete picture," he said.
The problem is large, he said, but doesn't attract much attention.
"It's just that there's not a lot of advocates for the dead," he said.
http://www.southernstandard.net/news.php?viewStory=25973