Organization helps ID woman missing since '05
By Margaret Harding, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, December 8, 2011
A memorial service for Kimberley Wagner will be conducted at 3 p.m. Sunday in Calvin Sheffield Funeral Home, 1125 Allegheny Ave., North Side.
The mystery of a North Side mother missing for more than six years ended with the identification of her skeletal remains through DNA testing and some measure of closure for her family.
"There is a sense of calmness now, but it still hurts to know that we've been looking for this long and that she's deceased," said Brandi Brady, 33, of Memphis, Tenn. "That's probably the hardest blow."
Brady last spoke with her mother, Kimberley Wagner, 53, in 2005. Shortly after, Brady said, she couldn't reach her.
"She had a history of addiction, but she would stay clean for some time," Brady said. "She would go through these bouts up and down, and that would determine whether I would talk to her or not."
Brady, who left Pittsburgh at 15, said a relative told her that she filed a missing-person report in 2007, but city police have no record of it. As time went on, Brady grew more worried, and she filed a missing-person report in June 2010.
About three months later, an industrial painting crew clearing brush from abandoned railroad tracks on the trestle over Anderson Street on the North Side spotted a skull and called police.
Two investigators of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office interested in implementing federal guidelines on missing-person cases took an interest in the Wagner case. They formed a nonprofit organization -- PA Liv Safe -- and uploaded DNA, dental records, and other identifying information onto the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems. NamUS is a website that connects missing-person reports with unidentified remains.
Pennsylvania State Police contacted the group in October to say that DNA they uploaded matched a sample taken from Wagner when she was incarcerated in 2006 for aggravated assault. A lab at the University of North Texas confirmed the match in November.
"We had nothing to go on," said Kelly Vay, co-founder of PA Liv Safe, which seeks to assist families and law enforcement on missing-person cases in Pennsylvania. "We really just had bones. Coming back within 14 months that we have a missing person that it matched to is huge. The only way we could've linked it is through DNA."
Jennifer Sullivan, the other Pa Liv Safe co-founder, said the group is working to identify four other sets of unidentified remains found in Allegheny County.
"These cases that have been in for 10 to 15 years, we're actually getting leads on them," Sullivan said, who is no longer at the Medical Examiner's Office.
The office has not determined a cause or manner of Wagner's death. Her remains were found wrapped in a blanket in an area frequented by homeless people. Signs of facial trauma were consistent with injuries that Brady said her mother incurred in a car accident.
"It's a mystery," Pittsburgh police Lt. Daniel Herrmann said. "The identification is a lot, and now we can start looking into how she lived her life."