Identified! MI - Detroit, Body found in Detroit River, Mar'10 - Crissita Cage-Toaster

[Gardener1850]

DETROIT — Detroit police recently told the parents of a woman reported missing in 2009 that investigators actually found her body in 2010 and later buried her unidentified remains, blaming the mistake in part on investigative records that wrongly listed her ethnicity.

The parents of 28-year-old Crissita Cage-Toaster said they gave police a detailed description of their daughter — including of a large rose tattoo on her shoulder that included her parents’ nicknames — when they reported her missing in October 2009. Detroit police had discovered the woman’s abandoned car, with her purse, ID and cellphone inside, on a large island park east of downtown.

Local officials notified her parents this week of plans to exhume the body, which was buried with other unidentified remains at a cemetery west of Detroit about a year after it was discovered. The parents said Detroit police were negligent in their initial investigation.

Cage-Toaster, who lives in Atlanta, periodically checked in with Detroit detectives in the years after the case went cold. Then in April, she reached out to the National Institute of Justice, which maintains a public database of unidentified remains and missing persons. The database includes details like tattoos.

Cage-Toaster urged the organization to focus on her daughter’s tattoo. She said that’s when the organization contacted Detroit police, who later made the connection between a body found in the Detroit River in 2010 and the case of Cage-Toaster’s missing daughter.

http://fox6now.com/2017/10/30/so-ma...nce-2009-say-police-found-her-5-months-later/

Rosita Cage-Toaster, 58, and her husband, Johnny Toaster, 64, formally reported their daughter missing Oct. 29, 2009. They gave a detailed description of their adult daughter, including of her distinct tattoos

For years, she periodically called Detroit police investigators hoping for a clue, but nothing turned up.

Then, on Sept. 29 of this year, Rosita Cage-Toaster received another unforgettable call.

"It's when we got the news she was deceased, and they actually found the body on March 30, 2010," Cage-Toaster said.

Their daughter's body was pulled from the Detroit River five months after the initial missing person report, but police and Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office investigators never realized the body was the missing Detroit woman.

The medical examiner, according to the mother, performed a cursory death investigation, not a full autopsy and tagged her Jane Doe 10-3047. The cause of death has never been determined.

One major reason the body was never linked to the missing-person report is that both Detroit police, who pulled the body from the river, and the coroner, recorded their daughter as either Caucasian or Hispanic.
She was black.

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2017/10/family_to_exhume_daughter_acci.html

*Wasn't sure where to put this as I could not find an unidentified thread for the body found in 2010 nor a missing persons thread for Crissita.

 

[cvaldez1975]

appalling....

 

[tatertot]

May Crissita Rest in Peace.

I hope it's okay to post this link; if not, mods please remove. We had the NamUs UID profile copied on Porchlight; it had been posted to NamUs in March 2012:

http://z10.invisionfree.com/usedtobedoe/index.php?showtopic=53619

The detailed information about her tattoos was there but they did have her race incorrect, as the articles stated.

I can't find out if Crissita had a MP profile on NamUs. Her mother said she urged LE to look for Crissita's detailed rose & names tattoo. It just seems like if she had a NamUs MP profile with the names on the tattoo listed, a Websleuth type would have made a match soon enough based on the tattoo description even if the race listed for the UID didn't match, because what would the odds be that two women would have the same personalized tattoo? Unless the NamUs system would have flagged the two cases for manual comparison right away?

 

[Gardener1850]

This case makes me wonder how many UIDs have been described as the incorrect race, delaying identification. I know with skeletal remains I have seen it more than once where the description of the description of the remains changed from black to white or vice versa. One of those cases that comes to mind was Jeffery Sharritt. They said his remains were of a black or bi-racial male and he ended up being a white male: http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...4-40-near-Uchee-Creek-Sep-15-Jeffery-Sharritt