by It was twenty years ago when an Arizona man called a sheriff’s deputy in Yavapai County, Ariz., to report a unique and disturbing discovery: While looking through his childhood rock collection, he found a misplaced human jawbone. as a stone.
The county medical examiner’s office tried for years to find the owner of the errant piece of mandible, but their DNA databases turned up no matches. And then, earlier this week, one finally emerged when the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey announced that it had confirmed a genetic match.
The bone belonged to Capt. Everett Leland Yager deceased of the United States Marine Corps. There was no mystery about Yager’s death; the Orange County Register, then named the Santa Ana Register, reported that the 30-year-old Missourian had crashed and died during flight training in 1951 near El Toro Naval Air Station in Orange County.
The surprise was that part of Yager’s jaw was not in his grave with the rest of his remains.
“We have no idea how [the jawbone] into the child’s collection,” said Paul Wick, public information officer for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. “All the circumstances surrounding [makes this case] unique.”
In a press release from Ramapo College, the investigative team hypothesized that a scavenger may have picked up a piece of his body and transported it across state lines from Southern California to Arizona.
This cold case is one of two the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department has successfully closed thanks to the free services of the forensic genealogy lab at Ramapo College, which began partnering with Yavapai County a year ago.
“It was a really exciting moment,” said Cairenn Binder, assistant director of the Genetic Investigative Genealogy Center. Yager died on July 31, 1951, according to Yavapai County officials, and now a discovery was bringing his story back to life 73 years later. “People were shouting across the room and running over to each other’s computers to show each other their results,” Binder said.
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Six students were undertaking an intensive workshop at the center last summer, and together they came up with a lead that the bone belonged to Yager. One of the people who helped, Ethan Schwartz, was an intern in his sophomore year of high school. According to Ramapo College, he is now one of the youngest people ever to help solve a forensic genetics case.
After receiving a tip from Ramapo staff, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department collected DNA samples from Yager’s daughter, which Bode Technology in Lorton, Va., authorized to verify the bone fragment.
Yager’s family declined to speak to the media, but Yavapai officials said the family is grateful that this piece of his body is being reunited with his remains 70 years after he was buried in his hometown of Palmyra, Mo.
Schwartz, a sophomore at Suffern High School in nearby Rockland County, N.Y., said he’s grateful to be able to contribute to a situation that feels personal about his own family history.
“I have a deep connection to our armed forces,” Schwartz said, explaining that his grandfather served in the Air Force and his great-uncle was a submarine commander in the Navy.
He is coming back to Ramapo College this summer to continue his research on the role of ethnicity in the search for genetic matches, as most of the DNA samples on file are from people of Western European heritage.
“Even if it’s not my major, I’m definitely going to have a passion for this,” he said. “I’m really grateful for the experience I had during the summer because I definitely want to continue in the future.”
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Although this multi-state saga is over, David Gurney, director of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center, said we can expect more cases like this to be solved in the future.
In the past, law enforcement agencies had to rely exclusively on the Joint DNA Index System administered by the FBI, which collected the genetic profiles of family members of missing persons and people who committed crimes. But now, Gurney said, forensic labs have access to a wide range of genetic information through commercial genealogy databases, such as Family Tree DNA and GEDmatch.
These databases contain people who have taken DNA tests for their own interests, said Gurney, an assistant professor of law and society at Ramapo College. With millions of profiles to draw from, investigators can often find distant relatives of the individual they are trying to locate or identify.
“It’s the most revolutionary way of doing investigations since the advent of DNA, because any DNA sample can now, given enough work and enough dedicated time, be identified,” said Gurney, who founded the genealogy center with Binder in 2022.
The success of the center’s crash course in DNA matching has doubled enrollment this year, filling 15 spots in the class and creating a growing waiting list. A degree in history or genetics is not required to become a forensic genealogist.
But for the public, Binder said, there’s a much more practical way to help solve cold cases like Yager’s: donating your genetic information by taking a DNA test offered by a commercial genealogy database. People should be wary of privacy when sharing their DNA with the government, Binder said, but she believes some people are willing to accept the personal risk for the greater good.
“Your DNA could be that key piece that brings home to us working on these [investigative] cases, solving violent crime cases, solving missing persons cases,” Binder said, “Every member of the community has a chance to make an impact in doing that.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
