93% of Law Enforcement Ignores Missing Persons Database

Crime-solving usually conjures up images of dossiers, interrogation rooms or all-night stakeouts. But sometimes cracking a case is a much easier -- and more mundane -- activity. In the missing-person case of Luis Fernandez, it took just a click of a mouse.

Fernandez had been missing a year before his family reported the case in 2008. A few weeks after they did, a DNA hit from a homicide victim found in an Iowa farm field broke the case: it was a match. Easy enough, right? Yet it's likely the mystery of Fernandez's disappearance "would never have been solved," says the detective involved, if not for one new, underutilized federal tool: NamUs.

Right now, some 40,000 sets of unidentified remains that currently lie abandoned in medical examiners' offices across the country. Prior to NamUs, the only recourse families and authorities trying to identify missing loved ones had was to cold-call individual medical examiners' and coroners' offices around the country -- and there are some 2,000 of them.

Since July 2009, though, the NamUs database (short for "Name Us") has given families and detectives a way to search those files for a hit. It's free, and has already acquired a credible track record -- apart from Fernandez, for example, it's also helped identify Kansas City's Paula Beverly Davis, who had been missing for 22 years until a relative ran across NamUs during a PSA on television. (Davis's body had actually been found only 14 hours after she went missing -- but remained unidentified until NamUs helped her family crack the case.)

All in all, the tool has solved 16 cases in just six months.But you wouldn't know it. Across the country, 93% of law enforcement still aren't using the database. Lack of publicity is one reason; fear of committing already scare resources to the program is another.

None of that is consolation to the thousands of families across the country that are seeking closure in the cases of their loved ones. Take the city of Phoenix, AZ as an example. The city -- which recently began entering cases into NamUs -- is home to over 500 open missing persons cases alone. Every year, some 100,000 adults and 700,000 children are reported as missing.

As tragic as Davis's and Fernandez's cases were, in some ways, their families were the luckier ones. A 2007 Department of Justice review, for example, found that only half of the nation's medical examiners and coroners' offices even had policies for retaining records on unidentified human remains in the first place. What's more, out of simple exigency, about 600 instances of unidentified remains get disposed of every year -- buried, cremated, etc.

Talk of DNA or dental matches and unidentified remains is hardly glamorous. It's not pretty or popular. But in so many cases, it's what gets the job done. NamUs can solve crime and help families gain closure -- but only if departments across the country decide to use it.

Photo Credit: Señor Codo