MS MS - Hattiesburg, WhtMale 22-28, UP4746, hit by car, 'Steve Hex (Hicks)', red hair/freckles, Dec'98

You have so much talent!

 

@ChatteringBirds Thank you so much for the lovely compliment! I try my best to help.

 

I have a group on Facebook that I started with a few people dedicated to "Steve Hick/Hex Mississippi John doe"
A member posted this this morning, she asked me to black out names so no one would get into trouble. Im sharing this with you here and maybe someone knows what steps can now be taken.

 

Wow, how awful. Does that mean all of his remains are lost? How does that happen???

 

Is that true, this UID's DNA has been lost?

 

That is what the police officer told her. Hattiesburg police lost his dna. Now I know they buried him in a graveyard there somewhere. I wonder how hard it would be to get him exhumed and dna extracted?

 

Oh my gosh, how awful. He was alive post-accident for such a long time. There was so much opportunity to get many and large-volume samples. I can't believe that they were so careless with the sample.

 

There is only one scenario I can think of where this would be forgivable...
Hattiesburg was hit by a pretty destructive tornado a few years back. It tore right through the center of town. If the sample was being stored somewhere that was in its path - That would be a freak, unfortunate accident. Any other reason for losing that sample would be shameful IMO.

 

I think you might be right

 

Good point. Still, if they had sent it to a lab for sequencing, they'd have the sequence stored on computers which can be backed up, etc. I wonder why they didn't send off the samples when they had them. I'm pretty sure that the forensic lab in North Texas had grant money to cover sequencing of UIDs.