New technology detectives are using to help solve cold cases :: WRAL.com

In the winter of 2016. A young man's body was found behind a building in Brooklyn with a T shirt on and a backpack filled with kids stuff, a novel, a notebook, some art supplies and we have no leads on his name. We don't know who he is. We don't know very much about him, but I know he was reading that comic. I mean it's haunting. I think about him all the time. It's cold cases like this one motivating the all women team in the new york city medical examiner's office, Aden naka yvonne Hudson Dr, Angela Solar going back to the 1990s, were currently managing about 1300 cases of unidentified individuals. The vast majority of cases these women investigate involved people whose identities are known, but when they have time they turn to the mysteries, you start to Wonder Like do they have a family member out there? I wonder if they had kids? Is there someone looking for them? You can't help to think about that stuff. It becomes deeply personal, doesn't it? It does. And we we all have unidentified individuals that we just constantly think about in the last two years. They have solved 20 cold cases. New technology. Together with good old fashioned detective instincts Can paint a remarkably vivid picture. A woman found in Brooklyn in 2011 tells a whole story just with her teeth including this denture and this is quite typical in Central American and Mexican communities. Isotopes in the teeth. She still has revealed even more everything that you ingest the water you drink the food you eat gets incorporated into your living tissue Bonus living tissue. So you literally are what you eat as a child. She frequently traveled from the coast to the mountains and some regions where that might be occurring are actually in central America. We're seeing the signatures overlap over Honduras. The team also reconstructs faces when all they have is a skull. A three D printer creates the model. Art students apply the clay. Nothing replaces seeing that person's face. And so this is really, it's been a really useful tool and how accurate is it? It's variable. Um, so it's, it's based on science in terms of the depth of tissue, the shape of your features, the features of your face. But there's a lot of artistic license involved. Always in the back of their minds, they say is the anguish families are feeling. There's nobody to go home to. Their. Aaliyah boomer was 27 when she went missing in 2015. Her mother says she loved to write and was outgoing. The family has no idea what happened. It's painful. It's very painful not knowing where your child is at and she's the baby. The medical examiner's urge families to search the government database, name us, which is also used by law enforcement and to consider as painful as it may be that medical examiners can help a cold case that may be years and years old. Why? Why does it matter so much for me. It's just heartbreaking to know that somebody is still unidentified, um, because somebody loved them, Somebody cared for them. Um, and we should too. It really matters to me that that person gets their name back and goes back to their home and their family, Stephanie got NBC News new york.