Six days before Christmas 2014, the doorbell rang at Kathy and David Meincke’s home, set amid the rolling hill country of Western Washington. Two women were at the door, FBI agents, who pulled out their badges to identify themselves and gave the couple some stunning news.
Five years earlier, fishermen had brought up three bones from the bottom of the Bering Sea. One bone, a tibia, had been finally identified through DNA analysis. It was the remains of the Meinckes’ son, Jeff, the FBI agents told them. He died on April 2, 2001, when his fishing vessel, the Seattle-based Arctic Rose, went down, claiming the lives of all 15 crew members in the worst U.S. fishing industry disaster of the past half-century...
Kathy was in contact with an Alaska state trooper who recommended she provide a DNA sample that could help identify her son’s remains, should they ever be found. The odds of that happening appeared ever so remote. Still, in the summer of 2001, she made an appointment with the Lacey police. They took a swab from the inside of her cheek, then entered the sample into a national DNA database...
Eight years later, in the early evening of Sept. 12, 2009, a 160-foot longliner called the Blue Gadus was fishing in the Bering Sea... Hooks had snagged a large piece of net on the bottom and it came up to the surface on a line. Some 40 feet long, the net was at risk of drifting back to the stern, fouling the propeller and disabling the vessel’s sole engine. Fothergill gave an order to cut that net. And fast. Down on the deck, assistant engineer Matt Vierling pulled out a short, serrated knife. Slashing away, he spotted about a half-dozen bones tangled in the mesh. He was able to bring three of the bones on board and laid them on deck...
A trooper’s report noted the bones were found at a depth of 426 feet. The location, it would later be noted, was some 40 miles to the southeast of where the Arctic Rose had, eight years earlier, been found resting on the sea bottom.
