When Laurel Nowell went looking for her teenage friend, Tammy Jo Alexander, she found herself deep in the online NamUs system — the federal government's attempt to help thousands of unidentified bodies finally reclaim an identity.
There, individuals, hoping to find a missing person, can get detailed information on unidentified corpses. The world of the dead was new for Nowell.
"I thought, 'Oh dear, this is not what I signed up for,' " Nowell said.
But, without Nowell's insistence that information about her friend get placed on the NamUs system, then the 2015 identification of Tammy Jo Alexander may have never happened...
...Nowell had been close friends with Tammy Jo when they were teenagers, but had lost touch. Around 2013 she and a former boyfriend of Tammy Jo decided to try to locate her, but could find no sign of her. Nowell found Tammy Jo's sister, Pamela Dyson, who long believed her sister had run away and started life somewhere else.
Nowell wasn't satisfied, but did not want to appear to be a nosy voice from the past. "I just didn't want to step on anybody's toes," she said.
Still, she continued to push to see whether a missing person report was ever filed on Alexander. She hoped to place information on NamUs, but learned that, understandably, a formal police report was needed. She then spent months working to get a Florida sheriff's office to do a missing persons report. Finally, she said, she found a sympathetic investigator.
The report eventually made its way to NamUs..
