Identifying three Southern Arizona John Does through genetic genealogy

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN 9) — Sitting at the Pima County Medical Examiners Office are the remains of more than one thousand unidentified people from the past 30 years.

Now with the funding from one college, they're hoping to find answers for three of them.

It's a mission close to Pima County Forensic Anthropologist Bruce Anderson's heart.

"So it can be extremely rewarding for us. Once we put a name on a skeleton, once we change John Doe to James Smith, then the family is notified," Anderson said. "So our best day as forensic anthropologists, is probably the worst day for most families."

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Ramapo College of New Jersey is funding genetic genealogy for three John Does out of Pima County.

"So we're hoping these genealogy studies which use a different part of the genome," Anderson said. "They can find relatives of our decedent and the genealogists can go through and tell us who are decedent likely is."

The first John Doe they hope to identify from Nogales. A Caucasian man who checked into a hotel under a false name in 2002. The second John Doe a Latin American who was found on Missouri Street in a Tucson dumpster in 2004. The third another Latin American who was found at Limberlost Park in 2008.

Through genetic genealogy databases they're hoping to finally name these three men.

"If somebody takes a DNA test, and they upload it to Family Tree DNA, or GED match, which are the two databases that we have access to, depending on that person's background, they're going to be able to help resolve different kinds of cases."David Gurney, Director of Investigative Genetic Genealogy at Ramapo College said. "And for a variety of reasons, the representation of Latin Americans in those databases is very low."

Gurney and his team set up a booth at this year's Festival of Books to try to gather even more genealogy samples in hopes of getting a better match.

"Pima County has more unidentified remains cases than almost any other county in the country," Cairenn Binder, Director of Investigative Genetic Genealogy at Ramapo said. "So it's really important to us to help out in any way we can to try to identify some of these remains.

On average it costs around $5,000 to identify remains through genealogy.

For more information on each of the John Does, visit ramapo.edu.