seriousness, Kary, thanks for inviting me
to come talk about NamUs. Most of you know about NamUs. Many of you are users,
case managers. So what we're gonna talk about today is a
little bit simplistic.
But for those of you who
don't know enough about NamUs or anything about NamUs,
everything you've learned so far this week, the
results of those analyses, you can put into NamUs. So if you have unidentified
people in your jurisdictions, you can put all of that
and a whole lot more into the unidentified,
the UP side of NamUs. Why am I standing here? Well, Kary, you have
to answer that. But I've been involved
with NamUs for four or five years I guess
before it was NamUs.
It started out with Randy
Hanzlick in the UDRS system out of Fulton County in Georgia. And then they started
building a missing person site. So, NamUs actually evolved. Even though it's one set--
it's a set of two databases, missing person databases, unidentified persons
database linked together.
But it started out as
two separate databases. The missing person's
database was developed chiefly at the NFSTC in Largo, Florida. The unidentified side was
developed just down the highway at Central Florida
under Carrie-- >> Whitcomb. >> Whitcomb's group.
But they are merged. We have been live now since
I think January of 2009. And it's a growing set of records both missing
persons and unidentified. For you anthropologists and
you people who work, you know, in the death investigations
field, it's the best tool you're
probably ever gonna see in your career for managing
unidentified cases and trying to link them to missing
person's cases.
I can't hardly envision how we
function before we had NamUs. Our office has 600
unidentified people going back about 20 years, and even
though we still use paper, binders, 3-ring binders, yeah. NamUs now allows us-- when we
get a phone call or an email, we just go right to NamUs. We don't go to those binders
first although they have a lot of information in it.
We don't even go on our own,
our own database for our office which is VertiQ, we
go right to NamUs. So I know a lot of
you do the same thing. You store all the
information that you have on your unidentified people in
NamUs and that's a good thing. That's a good thing.
For the anthropologist in the
office or in the audience today, what you may not know is that
some 2/3 or 3/4 of all the cases on the unidentified side of
NamUs are either skeletal or decomposed which means
they should have gotten or should get some day an
anthropological examination, which puts anthropologist
in a really good position. We made your players in NamUs,
the data entry and then-- data entry and then the good
data entry, quality data entry because obviously, the
database is only as good as the information in it. Then becoming case
managers of those cases. And then, been waiting
for, as Clyde and I we're just talking
about, waiting for the emails from the cyber-sleuth
to come in and say "Hey, could you check this MP
case with this UP case?" And you could get a
fulltime job in the future.
Funding maybe-- funding
maybe an issue but it will become a fulltime
job, has become a fulltime job for me just managing the
cases that we have in NamUs. So that's why I'm here. I know a bit about this
system, our office, my office, the Pima County Office of the
Medical Examiner in Tucson, Arizona uses it daily. And Beth Murray's
name is under mine because these are her slides.
We've been putting on
these dog and pony shows, Steve Clark's group, around
the country for the last year and are gonna do another
one in Los Angeles. They're called NamUs Academies. And in the NamUs Academies,
five people, professionals from each state, usually
a forensic specialist, one person from law enforce,
one missing person's advocate, a cop type and MLI are selected. And these five people from
each state, we've done three of these academies so far.
The LA meeting in two
weeks will be the fourth. These five people
are then supposed to go disseminate the
good word of NamUs, both on the missing
person's side and the unidentified
person's side. But since Beth already came
up with these teaching slides, we felt why reinvent the wheel
and we'll just slap my name over hers and we'll
go from there. So, has anybody here
not put a case in NamUs? Well, you're gonna want
to, you're gonna want to and I'm gonna show
you how easy it is.
So this is what we're gonna try
to do in the first hour today and then after luncheon. We have a little--
a little hands-on and we've put some
cases in ourselves. We're just gonna concentrate
on the unidentified or UP side because most of us will be doing
that, few of us, although some of us might put missing
person's cases in. They're virtually
identical databases.
The screens are virtually
identical but there are some
little variations. But let's just concentrate
on the UP side because that's what most of
your talents will be used for if you decide to use
NameUs in the future. And again, the most important
thing about the database is to put accurate information in. If you don't know ancestry we
have convenient little drop down that says "unknown," okay? What's the use of that? You don't exclude anybody on the missing person's
side if you put "unknown." If you shoot from the
hip and say "Caucasian" or can I say that word? I can say Caucasian, I
can't say "Caucasoid." If you shoot from the
hip and say "Caucasian" and that person may be Caucasian
but the family doesn't list them as Caucasian, you'll never
find that person in NamUs.
At least the algorithms won't
find that person in NamUs. They will exclude that
person so quality data, quality data is the key. So that's the first page of the
Unidentified Persons System. You wanna log in
using that log in.
Now, the URL is an ORG. Both of the independent
databases are ORGs but NamUs is actually GOV, so it's www.Namus.Gov
is the umbrella URL. But the two databases
are under ORGs. You can start a case
once you log in and get the appropriate
permissions and those of you that are already users,
you know what that means.
You have to be sponsored
by somebody, a coroner or a medical examiner. If you're working in that office or you're forensic
anthropologist for or medicolegal investigator for
that person, all you need is that person's permission. NamUs, the administrators
of NamUs have a list of every medicolegal official, the head of all those offices
county by county in every state. They had their phone number,
they have their address, they have their email address.
So once you get that person's
approval and you enter that yourself when you register,
that is easy than a couple of days' worth of emails
before you activate it. Okay, so you're in. You start a new case
and it's what, 10 pages. NamUs is I think is
10 pages, maybe 11.
The first one is for information so you can just read
these blogs. I don't have to read everything. The red asterisks
though are important because you can't get a case--
you can't get a case published in NamUs or approved in NamUs
unless these red asterisks fields are filled in, so you
have to pay attention to those. There's a lot of information
you can not put in.
You can wait a while. You can start a case and
add to it later but you have to hit these asterisk fields where it says required fields
marked with that red asterisk. So probably the most important
number is gonna be the case number, your medicolegal
case number, your ML number, your ME number, your MEC
number, whatever you use. You probably don't wanna use
a police report number here.
There's a police page. You'll see down here that there
is a police information page. You can put that-- you
can put that number there. And you use a calendar
function to get to date found.
That's the date body is found
not the date you think the person died. You want to describe the
current location of the remains. It could be as easy
as just your address or the Fulton County
Medical Examiner's Office. If the remains in
some of these cases, especially the cold cases,
they've been released already and they've been
buried or cremated.
If you can get that information
from the Public Fiduciary Office or some other public
office within your county or your jurisdiction, you
certainly can add that there. Save your data. Every-- don't ever leave a
page without hitting Save, hit it a couple of times. There's also a nice
floating Save bar.
You don't see on
this printout here but they've added a Save
bar that floats with the-- as you scroll down the page. It's a very nice feature but
you gotta save your data. So you do this and all
of a sudden you come up and you get your
numbers in there and you get your
now new number 7333. That's your NamUs
UP case number.
That is a unique number. It's-- they're sequential. We're up in the 9000s
now so this is a year or several months old. >> You'll also list your name.
So Beth Murray put this case in, so now after that first page
is saved she becomes the case manager. The case manager
should be somebody who has access to
all the records. You may not have access
to the body or the bones or whatever remains there are but you should have
access to the case records. If you can't get
the case records, you probably should let some
other person who has access to those records to
become case manager.
And it's very simple to
go to the context page and change case manager. Now, in my opinion, it's
better to have someone like you in the room be case manager
if you know a little bit about the case than make
somebody who won't answer email. And the reason I say that
is this email address, is the address that
the cyber-sleauth and families are gonna contact. You're gonna get these emails
and phone calls in some cases and it's better if
someone conscientious talks to the families and
the cyber-sleauth than somebody who doesn't care.
So, if you feel that the
person with all the records and you can't get them all
and maybe their remains and they don't wanna
give the remains to you. If you feel that person won't
do a good job as case manager, I'll leave that up to you
and tell you face to face. Then you can remain
as case manager. Better to talk to a family with
a little bit of information than to put this in
someone else's hands who won't answer an email.
And certainly, we have--
I speak from experience, we have changed our cases
to a different case manager and then got emails
from people saying, hey, this person won't return my
calls or answer my emails and I noticed you
are also listed or you are listed one time
in the past and you helped me out on a different case. So, a word to the
wise on that issue. You'll get this nice red
highlight or line up here that says the case does
not meet requirements. Well, it doesn't yet because
we haven't been to every page with all these red
asterisks fields.
Once we get to all
the pages and we fill in all those required fields, then we can actually
submit this for publication. And there's the Save bar,
that's the new Save bar there. That's very, very,
very nice to have. So we go to the next page.
Now I guess we're gonna
summarize the case information specifics. So here I use the one
number and you wanna know-- wanna list something
about the disposition. Many of these cases
have multiple reports, autopsy reports, DNA reports, anthropology reports,
odontology reports. You may have fingerprint
records in there.
There's a place in
NamUs to list all these. You don't have-- you can put
a lot in the comment section on the first page but there
are also specific pages. And the nice thing about
that comments page is all that text is searchable. So for instance, we could
put information like ID cards on the police page and we do.
But we also wanna put that
name, an ID card that we-- that seemingly can't be
proven to be this person. But we also wanna get that name in the text fields
on the circumstances. Because an ID, the matching
ID could be as simple as a family typing in their
son's name and searching and it will search
all the text fields. That has happened before.
Okay, the demographics
page, so the anthropologist, anthropologist probably
have something to say on virtually every
one of these pages. More so, there's a couple of
pages that MLIs typically do but anthropologists
can weigh in. And the results of our
analysis can be entered in on a variety of pages. But obviously, this is a big
one, age, race, ethnicity, sex, height, and weight.
It can all be put under
demographics page. Now, you can read
all these yourself. I don't have to read it for you
but as far as weight it should-- it goes without saying but
some people have put the weight of the bones. They weighed the bones and
put that in the weight.
Now, weight is a
searchable field in NamUs so if you put 18
pounds of bones, you're not gonna find any adult. You might find some kids but
you're not gonna find any adult. And this has happened and I
tell you how critical it can be. There's a way to adjust the
parameters around weight but we had a case of a dismemberment a
couple of years ago.
We had everything but the hands
and the feet and the head. So I don't know what head
weighs or hands and feet weigh, but we had about 180
pounds of everything else. This is a 230-pound,
225-pound man. And the person doing the
data entry saw the 180 and so that sounds reasonable.
Well, that's kind of
what we do in our office. So not only I put--
do I put cases, I mean a lot of students do. We say if it's, you know, if
it's 90 pounds or 70 pounds for an adult, someone who
is dehydrated or mummified, maybe partly skeletal,
don't put that in there. But if it sounds reasonable, so
we put in 180 pounds and for two or three moths, we-- NamUs
couldn't find the guy who is in on the missing
person's side in NamUs because his family had him 230.
So the primaries I think were
10 or 20 pounds so they went down to 210 up to 250. So eventually, we found
that was the right guy but we could have done it. We could have done that
the algorithms we found in this potential match
had we put "unknown." So, in a case like that of a
dismemberment or decomposed or dehydrated body
unless you can calculate to a pretty good degree
of accuracy what you think that person weighed, just
put unknown or can't measure. It's better to be broader in
NamUs, it's better to cast-- or intervals are wider, the algorithms have a better
chance to find that person.
Now, that doesn't mean
NamUs totally requires these algorithms to find
matches, quite the opposite. Most of the matches
are found by people. It used to be that you and I
had to do it, the police had to do it, or the medical
examiner had to do it. Now, anybody can do it.
There were kids who
get on this website and play this we're
told as a game. You know, here is a
dead guy, go find a list of missing people
that might match. Now, whether you want to use
it at that way as a game, kind of like the
geocaching, if you will, or you're the mother looking
for her missing daughter. Still, it's a lot of eyeballs
on the computer screen.
So we're fond of saying in NamUs
that you work 8 hours a day but your cases are
worked 24 hours a day, or at least your cases can
be worked 24 hours a day. So regardless of the
intentions or the motivation of the people using NamUs,
you get these emails sent to you saying "Hey, compare
this case with that case." And sometimes they're right. Sometimes they have found-- Kary
could tell you more about that. They have found a match.
So, okay, required
fields, body condition is in PMI are semi important
although I have to tell you with PMI you can type in-- you can type in the postmortem
interval like 10 to 20 months but it won't be saved as that. So if you didn't know
this, this is important to point out right now. Let's say you had somebody--
let's say you had a skeleton that came in in August of 2011 and you thought it
was one to two years. You could type in
2009 to 2010 in here.
That will be saved but for
interval, leave that blank and for the units here, just
drop down, just put years. Because if you type again 10
to 20 months, it won't come up, that's the problem with the
NamUs that they're working on. But what happens is you end up
getting something that says 10 and then you see months. And then some people could
interpret that as "Oh, he died 10 months ago." He was found on this date.
He died 10 months ago to the
day when we know in the room, you can't estimate
the PMI to the day. So that's a little
glitch right now but I think they're
working on it. But it's something that
for all cases, you entered, subsequently you should
probably pay attention to that. If you do have some
cases in NamUs already and you have a free half an hour
or an hour when you're at home, go back to that page, all your
cases while you're logged in and just edit that out.
Edit that out. You can only-- it wouldn't
be confusing to you because you'll see and you'll
think what does that mean? I typed in 10 to 20 months but
to somebody who is searching and they see that, it
could be confusing to them. So now we have age,
age range, race, and sex are all shown 'til
all the highlighted fields are shown. If you can't estimate
the weight, you just put you
can not estimate.
If you reconstruct--
if you-- excuse me. If you estimate the
stature from the length of a long bone, then
put estimated. If that person is
measured prone heel at the autopsy, then
put measured. That's the two possibilities,
estimated and measured.
So even though we can't put
in plus or minus 3 inches, if we say estimated,
it's kind of implied that it could go a
few inches either way. >> Are they gonna change that though 'cause I
have families just freak out about that. You said he was [inaudible]. He was actually 6 foot
tall and they got on and on and it's really exhausting.
>> I think if anything,
we're gonna-- they're gonna stop
using stature. We stop using weight
as a primary criterion because of the issue
with the bones decomps and the dismemberments. But there is some talk about
not using that anymore, or educating people to how to
change the search parameters so you don't exclude
someone like that. You know, statures
are very problematic.
We, you know, we can as--
anthropologist, you know-- we can estimate and
be pretty sure that we knew how
tall this person was. But if the family doesn't
have that recorded or the guy, you know, lied about his
height or the woman lied about her height or
didn't know the height. >> Perhaps we should just
put in estimated regardless of whether we measured
it or not. >> Yeah.
Well, we do searches. That wouldn't be a bad idea. When we do searches we just
go up and we brought that out to plus or minus 6 inches. We figure the family
probably knows within a foot how
tall that person was.
But their families may not
conduct their searches that way. Okay, so kind of summarizing
the demographics page. If you say something and
this sounds simplistic but it's relatively important. If you estimate an age
to be 45 or 25 to 45, then you also wanna go to
the drop down that says 350.
If you estimate 30 to 50,
then you should say pre 60 because if you believe
the person could be 50, then they're not pre
50, they're pre 60. The age except for the kids
that's pretty straightforward, always put unsure. If you're not, if you're
not positive put unsure because like I said,
those algorithms, that will exclude people out
if we're wrong and we know as anthropologists, you know,
we could be wrong on ancestry. We could be wrong on everything.
We could be wrong on age
and even sex at times. But always put unsure
if you're not sure. The mixed ancestry,
if it has a mixed-- if it appears to be of mixed
ancestry whether you're doing this from skeletal remains or
just looking at a deceased body, you can describe that in
circumstances of death. But again, what a family
puts down for the ethnicity or ancestry or race of a person
and what we put down, you know, could be different things and that could be the
basis of exclusion.
So we thought about and we still
might do, we may go for all of our cases, all 600
change race to unsure. We're not getting a lot of
hits, we're not getting a lot of matches, so we thought about
doing that on some cases just to see if we get more hits. So you can play around. You can change things.
And when you're case
manager on your UP site, you can broaden things out. So let's say you only have one. Let's say you're lucky enough
to be in a jurisdiction, you only have one
unidentified person. So everyday you can devote half
an hour or an hour to that.
You can go change your
parameters in this and see under potential matches, you can
actually, you know, get a few and then you can-- if
there-- obviously the missing, the missing person's report
has to be in NamUs for you to do this if the family
hasn't taken the time to put the missing person that
you have the body of in NamUs, this is not gonna work. But if the assumption is that
the person might be in there, then it's not a bad way
to use some of your time. Okay, weight and height, you
want to use the estimated or measured or cannot be
estimated, you have to choose, you have to choose one of them. The system will not let you
publish it if you don't do it.
Don't use zeros. If you can't, leave it blank
and say you can't estimate but don't put zeros in there. The algorithms will actually get
confused in the search on that and we talk about decomps and
skeletons and dismemberments. Body condition and
time since death, if you have a recognizable face, there should be a
photograph of that face.
Now we know some
cases are, you know, photographs were taken
or they've been lost. But another power of
NamUs is the images page. You can put as many images
and are encouraged to put as many images as you can there because the families
are looking. So images of the face are great.
They gotta be relatively
a decent photograph. Dr. Hanzlick who Mark works for probably wouldn't
allow a decomposed face to be put on there. You can put any image on there and say don't make it
viewable to the public.
And then only we can see it,
law enforcement can see it. But if you want the public
to help identify your Jane or John Doe, just put photos out
there that you think, you know, the parents or the siblings or the friends could get
some information from but they would just-- they wouldn't be horrified
by seeing the condition of a decomposing face. Circumstances, so here
we can fill in the state. You have to fill in the
state and the counties.
It's a drop down. If the post was done
somewhere else, you can list the other agency. You enter cause and
manner if you want. It's never viewable
to the public so the public can never
see a cause and manner if you wanna put in there-- if
you wanna put it there, you can or you can put it
on the police page but it's never viewable
to the public.
The circumstances of a
recovery are good because here's where you can put down
names and some other clues or some other terms that a
family might be searching on. And when they do a
search on the UP side, this is one of the text boxes
that is searched as well as a few other text boxes. So it's a good place to put in
two or three or four sentences. Now, we will cut
you off after about, I think it's 160 characters.
So there's a space limitation
on this but you can-- you got two or three sentences to get all the pertinent
information. We still don't have
enough to be published but we're working at it. But you also notice
that we have a star now. Does the star show up? We have a five-star system.
So one being the lowest, actually no stars being the
lowest but the goal is to kind of get all five of those
stars lit up in yellow. And you could do that by putting
in a facial image and putting in fingerprint information and
putting in dental information and putting in DNA information. You don't have to have it all
but if you have some combination of those things, you will
get up to four or five stars. >> In circumstance
of death here, is there where you
put the possible name of the individual if you'd-- >> We do, we do.
We do because again
that's searchable and if their family just
searches on that name, it will come up there. >> [ Inaudible ] Okay. >> Yeah. Now, I'll leave it up
to you as far as images page and we'll get there in a minute.
But we put-- we scan ID cards
especially if they are thought to be fake or bogus
or fraudulent. If that person doesn't
appear to exist in that state or that country and our
investigators say this is a bogus card, we'll
scan the whole card. Now, there could be some
sensitive information on there but we think that by putting that out there making it
viewable to the public, if the name is close to
the guy's name or state or the birth date are the
same for the missing person, it's a potential lead. Because this is web based
and anybody has access to it, you know, you could right
click any image and take it.
You can download
anything up as you want. And the security issue
is there of course and I guess what I'm trying to
get at is we haven't been bitten by this yet, by identity
theft or something like that where it's been traced back
to us and we had to answer to why we put that potentially
sensitive information on the NamUs webpage. If that happens, we
may change our policy but right now we think any
and all information that comes in with that body could be a
clue to identify that body. And again, we've had
enough fraudulent ID cards where the name was either the
same except for a middle name or the name was different but
the birth date was the same.
It's like people won't
lie about everything. They'll selectively lie but it's like I can't remember
a whole new identity so I'll just change my birth
date but I'll keep name. So who knows on that card what
might actually be something that's searchable
by the families. That's our policy.
Each jurisdiction probably may
feel differently about that. So I just summarize the
circumstances pages. Address is good. If you have GPS coordinates,
please get them in there.
If you have two different or
three different ways to describe like the GPS coordinates
and then maybe 5 miles south of mile post so and so, on route
so and so, put that in there. If you have something else
like, you know, three blocks from the church and
whatever street you can-- and you don't have
street address. Obviously, if you have street
addresses, that's good. In Arizona, most of our deceased
are nowhere near, a name, street, let alone a number.
But if the person dies
in the city of course, street address is fine, is fine. >> Bruce? Question, if -- if the
ME's office is going to get DNA, let's say they think
they have a possible ID. And they're gonna get a DNA
sample, do you or would you wait to put this in or would you
wait or go ahead and put it in and just wait for
the DNA results? >> We've been waiting
more than a year for DNA results or DNA lab. >> Then you have to have [ Inaudible ] have to be to be in Namus.
>> If you want a free exam at
UNT, they have to be NamUs. So my answer to you is I would
say put them in right away. We typically wait about a couple
of weeks to a month to let the-- if they have fingerprints, if
they have anything identifiable. If the police even act
like they're interested in helping us identify
this person which is not always the case, especially with foreign
nationals, we kind of let that normal thing run
for two or three weeks.
If bones come in with no
ID cards, we'll put those in NamUs the day we do
the anthropology exam. And we'll cut the bone
sample for DNA that day. So I would say put in
them there earlier just because of the long
wait for most DNA labs. >> You mention going back,
what kind of cases do you have or would we have the
ability to selectively pull out our own cases
by the case manager.
>> You get a dashboard. You get a dashboard that shows
you all your cases and then when you only have
5 or 10 of those, you know, you can manage those. When you get up to 100 or 400, then you could do
some case tracking so you can get a subset
of all your cases. Yeah, it's pretty easy to
track your own cases, yeah.
Uh-huh? >> [ Inaudible Remarks ] >> Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> The GPS coordinates, is
there any preference per system? >> No, no, no, either--
anyway, either way. Okay. The physical
medical page, a lot-- I'm sorry, you had a
question, I'm sorry.
>> So you mentioned
case managers, on our NamUs cases
Jenny[inaudible] case manager and now I've been entering
some of the cases into NamUs. But in the past, some of our
cases were out of county. So as long as Jenny signed
in, she can make adjustments to those out of county cases. I can't.
I can only
do Harris County. Is there a way? >> That's not a NamUs
restriction. It's maybe something
in Harris County. All you have to do is
ask Jennifer if she would or Sanchez, Dr.
Sanchez? >> Yes. >> Yeah, so Jennifer is
working under his name just like I'm working under our
chief medical examiner. All they have to do is act-- I'm sorry, you don't
have to do-- Dr. Sanchez.
You have to get the
coroner or medical examiner for those other counties
to agree to do it. >> Okay. >> So for instance, we currently
have a postdoctoral fellow and two pre-doctoral fellows and
they're-- they can put cases in, enter cases in four different
counties in Arizona just like I can but we had to answer that change 'cause there was a
time when only I could do that. So if you want to edit those,
those other county cases, it's not a NamUs restriction.
You just have to
get the permission and since Jen must have it, Jennifer Love must
have the permission for those county agencies. >> She generally just makes
those changes but I just wanted to see if there was a way
around it, or, cause I mean, if we have-- if I have
to make a change instead of contacting the justice of
the peace, I just tell Jennifer to make the change
herself[inaudible]. >> Right, it's right. That's right we change
it in our office because I was getting this
list that you gotta go in there and change it 'cause I
can't get to your case.
So I just ask Steve
Clark who runs ORA, one of the two architects
in NamUs, if we could get the fellow's
permission to do those counties. And the only requirement is that
that medical examiner or coroner for that county gives
their approval. They have to know about it. That's why I said since Jennifer
Love is already the case manager for those non-Harris
county cases in Texas, I assume that's already
been done.
So they probably
would be as easy as having Jen just send an
email to Steve Clark and saying, "Can you activate Deborrah for
these additional counties." And then you could
have full edit. Yeah. So those of you
that only have to deal with one county that's nice. But most of us, especially the
anthropologists in the room, you know, we extend beyond
our county borders and many of us do multiple counties.
Some of you do the whole state
or may do the whole state. Some of you go like
Krista in different states. So that's a whole-- that's
just a difference in degree and not a difference in kind
so you couldn't be activated for any of those counties that
you work in Indiana or Illinois as long as you have
the permission of those medicolegal officers. >> But I had a question
about that.
Since coroners are
an elected position and they rotate out frequently. Do you have to get
continuing permission from each new coroner? >> NamUs monitors that. The people at ORA monitor this
if not yearly, at least yearly and maybe during
every election cycle. Yeah, everybody is-- registration expires
after one year so whenever you register
12 months later, you'll get a notice saying,
you know, so you just have to say I'm at the same
address, I'm at the same this, you know, my boss is the same.
If anything has changed, you
need to let the administrators or you can just send them an
email that things have changed and they'll verify
that and you'll just-- they'll get you up
for another year. >> We've also gotten a little
more cautious with the address because we have the
web-sleuths go out to scenes. Just letting you know that
[inaudible] find anything there and they're gonna interview
some people in the area and law enforcement like,
can you kind of make that a little more vague. So instead of the southwest
corner of the block, it's just a vague
intersection or vague area of town which is unfortunate.
>> Well, yeah, I think I
mentioned geocaching a few minutes ago and there was
an app, a computer app that I was asked to sign
off on that was all about-- you know what geocaching is. So this new app, this new
geocaching game was to go out and see death sites. So I didn't sign off on it. In fact, I told them they
shouldn't do that principally because some of these areas are
so remote that the person going out there could die themselves.
But the other consideration I
think as Angela has hinted is that you can get people when
you put down the address in grid corners even though
they're kind of fussy. But if you can get somebody
close and they can see perhaps, you know, where the person died
by the condition of the soil and they do a little
search around it. I'm sure they could find more-- if the person was
partly skeletalized, they could find more
skeletal elements. So the last thing we want, we
think, you could argue I guess that that would be a good thing.
If somebody went back to this
site and got these remains, but if they don't call
the law enforcement and you just get these kids
that are out geocaching, then post something online
that they found what looks like a rib bone at this grid
coordinates, that's just gonna-- that would create a
nightmare for our office. So I don't think
they made that app. We asked-- we told them we
could not participate in it and told them they
shouldn't do it. But that's a risk and yeah,
this is all web based.
So, all this information
that's viewable to the public potentially
is being used for other than good reasons. So the greater good is that
a lot of people can see it. And perhaps and I didn't
stress this strongly enough. The most important feature in
NamUs has nothing to do with us in the room unless
you're missing somebody.
The most important
feature of NamUs is that it allows the families of
the missing to actively search for their missing loved one. Whenever they want,
every night, you know. When the phone calls of
the police are not returned or the phone calls of private
investigator are not returned and people just say, "You know, lady we don't have
any new information. We don't-- we don't
know what to do." And which is typical in
a missing person's case after a few days or a few
weeks or a few months.
Now these families
can go on and log on every night and
they can search. And if you and I are
doing our job and putting in recent unidentified
cases, we may be putting in the daughter one
of these mothers who were looking every night
to see if she's in there. So with that in mind, you know,
good quality information and lot of images making it
while still technically and anthropologically
correct, making it, you know, putting things in lay terms so the general public can
actually help us solve these cases. Okay.
The physical page, medical
page, we can put in a variety of things, hair color,
eye color. If the person, for the
anthropologist in the audience, if you've got an old healed
fracture, you can put in that. One of the things
we're fond of doing and this has happened several
times is we'll get a sternum that has 4 or 5-- that
has sternotomy and has 4 or 5 stainless steel
wires around it. So not only do we
put that in there, that's our stainless steel
wires in the healed sternum from open heart surgery, right? But we also put on on the scar
pages that there would be a-- we say inferred but we say we're
gonna infer a vertical scar down the chest.
Under medical stuff,
we're gonna say probable or we're gonna infer that the
person had open heart surgery. For those wires, they'll
make any other sense then. Somebody got in there and
touched that man's heart. So you put all that stuff in
and if you think it, you think, well, that's kind of redundant.
But what if a cousin knows
he had open heart surgery but doesn't know
about anything else? What if his neighbor had
seen him without a shirt on and knows he has scar but doesn't know
anything else, you know? What if he has told somebody,
"Hey, I go to the airport and that thing goes off,
the x-ray machine goes off, and I got wires on my chest." So you don't know what a person
knows about that missing person. So when you find something on a
bone, especially like a very-- like a healed fracture, especially a very grossly
healed fracture, you might infer that there could be
possible scars in that leg and that would give their
families who don't know about the bone being
broken but do know about the scar a
chance to find that. Always save your data. Be as detailed as you can.
Don't use all caps. I don't probably have
to tell anybody in here but occasionally, we get
cases and cases are entered with all capital--
all capital letters. Randy doesn't like that, Dr.
Hanzlick doesn't like that. None of us like reading
all caps either.
So now, you know, because we
have a scar on this person, we get a second yellow, we
get a second yellow star. So we're moving it up the
ladder a wrung at a time to being a strong case so
that if-- two things here-- if that missing person is
in the MP side of NamUs, the algorithms could
potentially link the two. >> But even if that person isn't
in the missing person side, the family or the friend of
that missing person who's just cruising the unidentified
website, even as a lurker, even someone who's even
logged in or registered, they can see all these things. This happens a lot.
This happens a lot with people
that aren't even registered, they just go in there and
they look at pictures and look at tattoo descriptions and
scar descriptions and come up with possible matches. >> Bruce. What do you think about facial reconstuction
putting them in NamUs? >> We put them in. That's the only thing we have.
Now we use the FBI. We use the FBI for
a couple of reasons. One of them is boy,
they're lifelike. They look like people.
Not all forensic artists I think
make a facial reconstruction or approximation look real. So these ones at the FBI
have been cranking up for us. They're very realistic. Now having said that, do they
look like the person in life? I don't know.
Our policy is to put those
in if they're lifelike. However, this banner photo
up here, this blue man up here, we can turn that. That will be whatever
photograph-- if you choose to put an
image in under facial ID, the first one you enter goes
up there and that becomes kind of the logo for this case. If we had a tattoo, let's say
we had a skeletalized tattoo so we had a facial
reconstruction or facial approximation done
and then we had a heart tattoo and it said 'Mom' in it and we
have a nice picture of that.
We would choose to
put that as our image. We would still put the-- and
we'll get to that in a minute. We would still put that facial
approximation photo in there but we wouldn't make
it the main one. But, you know some of
the facial approximations in NamUs are horrendous,
which is they don't-- to me they don't
look like people.
So I don't know what
good that does. But then again, I
don't know how good-- what good it does to put
these FBI generated ones in if they don't
look like the person. You know, until more research
is done, we're never gonna-- we're not gonna know if
they look like the person but any image is good. Anything to replace
that blue man is good.
Now in the case-- we just
started this a few weeks ago, and we stole the idea from Emily
Craig in Kentucky, but Emily has for years now when there is
no other image available, that has a image of
Kentucky and a star in one of the five quadrants
or five locations that she covers at Kentucky. So this is where
the body was found. So the blue man tells you
nothing except there's no images and there may be no way to create an image
if it's just bones. They mean nothing
to put in there.
There's no-- unless you have
visible teeth, anterior teeth in a skull, I would
say there's no reason to put any bone on that banner. You can put pictures
if you want and images if you think it might be a
good thing to do, but to put it up there can't do
any good unless of course the anterior
teeth are showing. But even if you don't have
any of that, you can-- and you know where the
remains were found, you can still generate
some kind of map catch-up and you can put like
we're putting. We're putting stars in the-- deep in the desert of Southern
Arizona showing the Mexican border with US and in case
some families know something about the crossing
location, that might be enough to get them interested.
But I would say put
something and get that blue man out of there. New York City-- go ahead. >> I'm sorry. You were saying you
wouldn't put up a decomp face but you would put
up a skull with the [ Inaudible ] ? >> Well, we would crop it.
We crop it. >> Okay. >>So let's say we get something
with a star on a tooth, a golden star, we would
crop it down into, you know, what I would consider
not offensive. >> Should it be then, put
the entire skull photo in? And would you do the cropping? >> No, no, no, no.
You would do that-- you
would do that-- yeah. >> We would do that? >> Yeah, yeah, you're
the case manager, yeah. If you creating that
case, you, you-- now you certainly can put
in a cranium, people have, there are plenty in there,
there are plenty in there. What good they do when they
don't have any you know, distinguishing features
on the teeth.
Again, you could argue that
the mother of that, if that's-- if the mother is looking
for her son, that would be such a turn off that they
wouldn't even consider that case. So, you could argue that actually it does
more harm than good. >> [ Inaudible Remark ] patient with a slope. >> That would be
different, wouldn't it? That would be different, yeah.
If you had someone with a flap,
a healed flap, parietal flap and you wanna show, you know. Certainly, would describe
that, it would describe that under bony skeletal
findings, under medical intervention. I would say, you know,
I wouldn't tell you not to put a photograph of
that in there, it could be, it could be a good thing. It's unlikely of
parents or the, unless, unless the surgeon is looking
for this missing person, it's unlikely that
anybody would've ever seen that but yeah.
We haven't done that yet but I
wouldn't say that's a bad idea. It might be some. If you look, if you know your
missing person had cranial surgery and you're just thumbing
through a bunch of images like that, I mean that, that
could come, that could come. And the text box for the
photographs are also surgical so when you do that, if you do
that photograph you'd also want to describe that this
is a parietal flap or prior cranial surgery.
And then that would come up and you could get another
possible link to that way. So, we're only concerned
and Dr. Hanzlick at Fulton County who's a--
who reviews all of these, we're just concerned I think with putting insensitive
things up there. But there is some
decomposed bodies and decomposed faces
on NamUs, you know.
It would be up to you. So, we got our second star and
now I think we can move out. Okay, medical so, here we go. Poorly healed fractures to the
right clavicle visible on X-ray, fine, partial hysterectomy.
So, you can infer some of these
scars either from a hysterectomy or from an appendectomy. You can infer these things if
your, if you wanna say inferred or you, you know qualified
you certainly can do that but NamUs searches for the word. So, if you put an extra words,
it'll still find hysterectomy, it'll still find appendectomy,
it'll still find scar. One thing you won't do is if
you typed in grey, G-R-E-Y, like I like to do
for some reason, I must have had a British
professor sometime.
It won't find gray, so G-R-A-Y
hair won't link to G-R-E-Y hair. So try to use a common
spelling and things that people would put in there. >> You can type them both? >> You can type them both. >> Medical terms, use
like layman's term and physician terms 'cause you
don't know what the family has access to or knowledge of.
>> Yeah, so hysterotomy
would be uterus, not present. >> Right, you know like
colon and gallbladder. >> There you go. It's a good point.
You don't wanna give-- if you
did a search and you got no hits or only one hit and there's
8,000 missing people in there, do another search, think about
it for a while like you said, add a few more words, think about how else you
could capture the same kind of condition and you probably
get a few more numbers in that. >> On the search, is
there and/or function or? >> No, just words, yeah. And also those partial
words, right. So, if you put in
and you'll get grand.
So, sometime, usually what
happens is you get too many and you think why
and you have to find out why did this one come up
and then you see what your-- you put in evil on a
tattoo that says evil and you get all the tattoos
that say devil so you just kind of have to play with
it that way. I guess, I guess that's by
design, they wanna do it that way but I think
it's better to get more, too many than too
few but if you do, if you do think you get too few,
and sometimes we do a search and we think, come on somebody
has gotta have a tattoo that says Mom, right? More than three people
have to have it. And usually if you play
around, you can get that. Okay, so the phenotypic thing, the phenotypical things
we can put in there, any kind of foreign objects.
If it has a, this goes with
respect to circumstances too. If it's a homicide and it's
like something that has to do with ligatures, you know you
would never put down, you know, a scarf that it was holding
someone's hands behind their back, you wouldn't list that
as personal effect, right? You wouldn't list
that as a scarf under clothing nor should you
put it, unless you come up, you come up with a real good
reason why you think somebody reading that NamUs page could,
that would be a good clue, because if you think about it, only the perpetrators
probably know about that scarf around that woman's
wrist, but this is, stuff like that can be put in
great detail on the police page and the general public can't
see that, only you can see it and the police can see it,
so things that you might, and sometimes in the
older cases, you know, we've done that, and this did a
oops like, oh we shouldn't put that there because you know
she wasn't wearing that. Like we've listed one time
a green blanket in addition to all the other stuff this
person had and had a backpack, and so you list the backpack
then you list the green blanket 'til you realize that she was
rolled, the body was rolled up in this green blanket,
there's no reason to think that was hers, so potentially
all you're doing is alerting the perpetrator that that's the
body, and if you think about it, they're probably are,
in homicide cases, the killers are looking
at NamUs. By now, 2 years later, it's out
there, people know about it.
I'm sure there are
some cases out there where men are tracking their
victims or that they see that the victims were found
and now they're tracking what, you know what's being
added about the body, so you don't wanna
give them any, anymore additional information. So, you don't want to put things
that are sensitive like that that might mess up the
police investigation and really have no ID value
except to the perpetrator. >> Fingerprints, we can
scan prints and we'll do that after lunch, if you want. You have to fill something
out, it's required fields, so if you can't get
them, you can't get them.
But if you can, you scan them
in and you say that they're or you say that they're
available in a certain area. The code is the old, the
old, what do they call them? The 10, the 10 codes. >> Henry System? >> Henry System, some people
put the Henry System in there, most cases don't have that,
but there's some old timer, old timer detectives, people
my age, a little bit older, they're still using
that, and they use that as a sorting criteria. So they have a, if they
having a missing person, and they have the card out
with the Henry Classification, and they're just thumbing
through which you can do, you can thumb through a hundred or a thousand unidentified
cases, just, and you come up, once you start thumbing
through with the-- you can't see it in this
slide, you can just go from fingerprint page to fingerprint page
to fingerprint page.
So, if you're looking at their
classification, it's just kind of looking at all
these UP cases, looking for the same
classification, they can actually exclude
which is a good thing, we'll talk about that
later or they can say well, you need to look at
this guy's prints? See that's the same
classification as my guy, but most of the cases at
NamUs if you go and look, they won't have anything
in that block. And then under comments, you
can say, who has the prints, whether they have been
submitted to AFIS, or they have been submitted
to the local, your local AFIS. Sometimes it's only partial
prints in a lot of our decomps, that you guys you know you get,
you don't get good ten prints, you get a few fingers, it
might be okay, so you can put that in there, which
digits have been printed, and then if you can
upload, scan those prints, upload them on the images
page and get them in there. We have had IDs made from
fingerprint examiners looking at and this attest to the quality
of the scanned images in here, looking at the prints at NamUs
and comparing them to prints in a U.S.
Government database,
matches have been made, so if you have good,
if have prints, especially if they're
good quality, you never know what
fingerprint guy might, you know, decide on that day to look
through all the cases, the new cases maybe for the
last month or last 2 months that have fingerprints, and then
compare his missing person's fingerprint to your
descendants fingerprint. Again, another thing, another
great thing about NamUs, when you're not working
your case, or if you have a hundred
cases, and you can't get to all of them, you never know when someone else is working
it, that's a good thing. That's a really good thing. Save your changes, obviously, go
to the next page, fingerprints as I just said, everything that
you upload has to be a JPEG.
So whatever you have you gotta
convert it, in the images. You can put PDF into
the documents pages but JPEGs only into the images. If you're gonna scan
radiographs, especially demo radiographs,
I think it's 400 dpi, 400 I can check on this but I believe it's 400
dpi is recommended. That's certainly a
good enough quality to make some valuable
comparisons.
Sometimes prints are unavailable
when you put the case in or you put the case in and you
don't, you know prints are run, you get reports that the
prints came back negative, but you don't know
where they're at. And if your jurisdiction is
like ours, it might take a week or a month to get the police to actually find the actual
print card, lend it to you for the day so you can scan
it and then get it into NamUs. But if that's the
case, then just put down that prints aren't
currently available. But when you do get the prints,
then go back and edit this.
Obviously, every
field is editable. You can change anything. We, I change things from
happy to glad all the time, and then back to
glad a week later because I forgot I changed
it from happy so you can, you can do a lot of
changing if you'd like to. Clothing and accessories,
MLI's and our [inaudible] in the office do most of these
information, they collect most of the information but it's the
anthropologists in our office that actually put it in.
So if you're in an ME system,
whether you're an anthropologist or not, you may be
asked to put this in. Next to the facial
photograph, probably clothing for the families
of missing people who know what the person was
wearing when they went missing and if that person is dead, probably that person
was killed shortly after he or she went missing. The family search the
clothing page all the time, they're looking for
jewelry, they're looking for particular colors,
particular styles of clothing. Now, a lot of families don't
know what the person was wearing or the person didn't die right
away so, but in those instances where the family is sure they
know, in an abduction case, they know what the person was
wearing then these are really good thing, really good thing
to have, fill that accurately.
>> So Bruce, you were
saying that you wouldn't put if someone had their hands tied
or something, you wouldn't put that taking that, thinking that
it might be the perpetrator? But, what about the used
her own scarf or something, the blind fold or something,
or could you just say, a flower was associated? >> I guess if you knew that, you thought that was a
strong possibility then yeah, you could list that in
the personal effects. You'd also list it
under, but you'd list, you would list it under,
what, give me an example where you would absolutely
know that with this dead body, that had to be her
clothing item. >> Yeah. >> Let's say a bra, let's
say a bra was taken off and her hands were tied with a
bra, okay, bad example perhaps so let's say, there's something
special about their bra.
On the police page, you
would put that a bra which is for a ligature, and
she was shirtless and didn't have a bra on. But and let's say, there's
a flower or something, her initials on that bra,
then on the clothing page, you would just list that bra
just as if it was on her body when she came in, that's
why you'd have that. [ Music ].
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