Sheriff’s Sgt. Nancy Rissi remembers the day when she gave the name back to a previously unidentified deceased woman.
From Los Angeles, she had been missing for a year before her skeletal remains were found in the Riverside County desert in 1989. At the time, DNA was not retained from bodies and the ability to identify someone through a DNA match had not been developed to the level it is today.
But when the technology improved, the Riverside County Coroner’s Office sent Jane Doe’s DNA to a laboratory, where in 2022 a match was made with the woman’s sister.
The missing woman’s parents had left a plot beside theirs at a cemetery in the belief that one day she would be found.
“Getting that story from the family member, that would bring tears to anyone’s eyes,” Rissi said.
Rissi, who heads up the coroner’s team that attempts to identify remains of people dead more than a year, said she hopes for more similar outcomes after the Board of Supervisors in April approved receiving a $496,045 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to help make those identifications.
“Right now, they are just John or Jane Doe, and a number associated with them,” Rissi said. “We know they have a name associated with them. Just to be able to give their name back … that’s one of the biggest driving forces for us.”
The money will, over three years, pay for a part-time team of a coroner’s sergeant, two deputy coroners, a forensic anthropologist, a forensic odontologist (teeth) and a genealogist. The grant will also cover the costs of exhumations and DNA tests. It is expected to be used for about 190 cases.
The challenges in identifying bodies have included money. Exhumations cost $5,000 to $6,000. Rissi said she hopes that the success she expects to have identifying remains thanks to the grant will prompt supervisors to increase the permanent funding.
Roughly 700 people are unidentified at the time of their deaths each year in Riverside County because of the condition of their remains or because they lack written identification, Undersheriff Donald Sharp wrote in a report he prepared for county supervisors. The current backlog is about 200 cases.
The Sheriff’s Department maintains a website of some of the unidentified people that includes photos and drawings of faces and autopsy reports.
Those people include a person with no teeth who was found submerged in a wash near Cathedral City in 2002; a male bicyclist who was struck by a pipe on a passing vehicle in the Pedley area of what is now Jurupa Valley in 1998; a man who had been shot and then set ablaze in Temecula in 1990; and a man whose fully clothed skeleton was found on a hillside overlooking the 10 Freeway south of Cabazon in 2001.
The oldest is a man who died in 1893, said Sgt. Wenndy Brito-Gonzalez, a sheriff’s spokeswoman. Little is known about the circ*mstances of his death, she said.
In another old case, the coroner is working on identifying a woman who was the victim of a homicide in 1974.
“Unfortunately, the reason that the decedents are unidentified is not as simple as one would hope it to be,” Brito-Gonzalez said. “If the public has a loved one who has gone missing, no matter how long it has been, reporting it to a law enforcement agency and providing their DNA so that it can be searched against the unidentified decedent’s is helpful.”
One of the challenges in identifying bodies, Rissi said, is that some families give up on finding their loved ones and fail to take steps that could be helpful.
There are a number of places where relatives can upload their DNA. Among them is NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems, at namus.nij.ojp.gov. It holds information for both missing people and their relatives, and law enforcement searches the database for matches. (The database is not used to link people with crimes, Rissi said.)
Rissi has been with the Coroner’s Office for 17 years and has been a sergeant for almost eight. The challenge of identifying the bodies and providing families with answers — even if it’s not the outcome they were hoping for — has kept Rissi working in this assignment instead of pursuing another.
“Letting the family know it’s their loved one … giving them answers to why someone has died. As tragic as it is knowing how they died, it provides some closure,” she said.
