Identify Unknown Human Remains

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office (HCME) serves the counties of Hennepin, Dakota, and Scott, including the city of Minneapolis. The HCME works closely with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies responsible for investigating the identity of unidentified persons and any circumstances of vague deaths. The Medical Examiner also acts as a preliminary screen for emerging trends in the public health and human services arenas. The primary goal of this project is to identify the backlog of unidentified decedents, some of whom may have been victims of violent crime or died under suspicious circumstances. The secondary goal is to digitize unidentified casefiles into our case management system (CMS), which will allow tracking of the cases that predate the CMS implementation. Project activities include inventorying of unidentified remains and casefiles at the HCME; entry of cases into the CMS; assessing individuals for probability of identification and priority; exhuming and transferring of unidentified decedents with absent data and/or no longer in the custody of the HCME to the office; collecting and submitting electronic fingerprints; obtaining antemortem medical and dental records, dental charting, medical imaging using computed tomography with 3-D rendering; collecting DNA samples for analysis and submission to the National Missing and Unidentified Person System and the Combined DNA Index System databases; collecting additional DNA samples for submission to open source DNA databases and subsequent genetic genealogy; and locating and collecting family reference samples for comparisons.