Sheriff partners with Mexico to ID remains

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office has joined forces with the Mexican Consulate to compare unidentified human remains and missing-persons reports in Mexico and Santa Cruz County in hopes of finding closure for cold cases, including several sets of remains discovered in the hills above Scotts Valley.
“This is a phenomenal partnership between local law and the Mexican government,” Santa Cruz Sheriff Phil Wowak said. “Since the early 1970s, there have been over 40 unidentified remains that we’re still investigating. With this partnership, we may be able to identify some.”
The new database will allow county investigators to look up missing-persons reports from Mexico and possibly connect cases that involve unidentified human remains with surviving relatives.
The alliance was born after the skeletal remains of a Latino man in his early 20s were found in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Summit Road in early March. A hiker came across the remains off Highland Way a few hundred feet from the road, likely more than a year after the man was killed, Wowak said.
The sheriff’s office kept news of the remains under wraps until this week, saying investigators had hoped to notify the victim’s family before telling the public.
Authorities measured the man’s skull and concluded he was Latino.
Reaching the family proved difficult, however, because investigators could not determine who the man was, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Ian Patrick.
As part of the new partnership, DNA evidence is collected from relatives of missing people to test for a match with unidentified remains.
On Monday, June 28, officials from the Mexican Consulate in San Jose delivered DNA samples in two sealed cardboard boxes as part of the investigation of the Highland Way remains. Authorities believe the DNA belongs to one of the dead man’s relatives in Mexico. Testing results could take a year, Wowak said.
“It’s very important to establish and provide DNA samples to help the Mexican community in the county of Santa Cruz,” said Pedro Espinosa, chief of legal affairs at the consulate in San Jose.
About 20 percent of the 40 cold cases in Santa Cruz County could be helped by the collaboration, according to Christopher Smith, the missing-persons coordinator at the sheriff-coroner’s office.
Authorities said they do not expect to solve the cold cases, but rather to identify the victims.
The remains found on Highland Way in March are the second unidentified homicide victim in the unincorporated northern end of the county in the past several years.
In October 2008, the decomposed body of a teenage boy was found north of Scotts Valley off Bean Creek Road. The boy was never identified, but he wore a blue button-up shirt and a gold ring with diamonds, and hair samples indicated he was of Latino descent. He had never been reported missing in the local area.
Now, through the database partnership with the Mexican government, the sheriff’s office can plow through missing-persons records in Mexico more efficiently and may be able to notify the teenager’s family, if he is from that country.
“Hopefully, we can bring closure to those cases,” Wowak said. “It’s very important to us to bring closure to the victims’ families.”