The FBI and Detroit police exhumed more bodies last week in the continuing effort to identify unknown homicide victims buried in “paupers' graves.”
The effort is the next phase of Operation UNITED, which stands for Unknown Names Identified Through Exhumation and DNA, a collaboration between Detroit police, federal authorities, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office and the medical examiner's office.
The unidentified remains date back to cold cases originating in the 1950s, way before DNA analysis was available. Even as late as 2013, it was not standard procedure to obtain the DNA of unidentified victims. This combination led to about 100 unidentified people buried between 1959 and 2013 in the city of Detroit. Exhuming their bodies now to collect DNA and use advanced analysis techniques allows hope of an identification.
Operation UNITED first launched in Summer 2019, exhuming 13 homicide victims from a cemetery just west of Detroit proper. Once the bodies are removed from their graves, DNA samples are taken. Those samples are then sent to NAMUS and uploaded into CODIS and NDIS, where they are searched against available databases. The 2019 exhumations identified two victims. One was a mother who went missing in 1987 when her son was a young child. The son, now an adult himself, submitted his DNA to a missing persons database in the hope of finding his mother. This ultimately helped police connect the previously unidentified remains with the man, who now knows his mother was murdered all those years ago.
In August of this year, police exhumed an additional 26 bodies from a cemetery in Canton and are still working to process DNA taken from those victims. It is unclear exactly how many bodies were exhumed last week from United Memorial Cemetery in Plymouth, but all in all, the task force has increased its operations in 2020.
Of course, the investigators have run into problems from time to time. During an exhumation last year, the police were only able to find one set of remains in the cemetery, sending them searching for the other six they were hoping to exhume. At the time, police told ClickOnDetroit that the cemetery’s records were bad, requiring the need for a follow-up warrant for the premises.
As WXYZ Detroit reports, Operation UNITED is the brainchild of Shannon Jones, a sergeant in Detroit’s Homicide Division. She told the news outlet that she looked at two walls in her office every day—one with families looking for loved one and one with unidentified victims buried in cemeteries. She knew there were family members on both walls, but without DNA, there was not much she could do—until she thought up Operation UNITED and the FBI consented to helping build the task force.
While identification is the main goal, examination of remains and subsequent identification may result in cold case leads. The technology of today is far more advanced than what forensic technicians and police were working with even in the 90s and 2000s, making a previous dead end not so dead anymore.
The operation’s premise and relative success has caught the attention of other municipalities. According to WXYZ, the FBI said other communities have already reached out wanting to form similar task forces for their unidentified buried remains.