New DNA Tests Are Identifying Missing Persons and Solving Crimes
Every year about 1,000 human remains go unidentified in the U.S. New genetic technology can give them names and return them to their families
www.scientificamerican.com
“When she went missing, it really hit our community hard,” says Haley Omeasoo, a classmate and a distant relative of Heavyrunner. Omeasoo, a descendent of the Blackfeet Tribe and a member of the Hopi Tribe, decided to pursue forensic anthropology so she could help find Heavyrunner and other missing Indigenous people. Today she’s a Ph.D. student at the University of Montana. In September Omeasoo joined other researchers at a workshop of the International Symposium on Human Identification in Denver, Colo., to share new strategies for using DNA to identify missing persons''
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''Omeasoo and her graduate advisor, anthropologist Meradeth Snow of the University of Montana, are working with the Blackfeet Tribe to create a DNA database of tribal members that can be compared with unidentified human remains. The tribe will own and maintain its own data.''
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''Someday this work could identify Ashley Heavyrunner’s remains. Omeasoo says she thinks about that possibility often. “Everyone still holds out hope” that somehow Heavyrunner is alive, “but it has been six years, and there’s been no answers,” she says. “So just getting her family closure, I think, is the most important thing right now.”
