At Least 40,000 Dead in the Morgues of the United States

At least 40,000 dead unidentified bodies or remains are in the morgues of the U.S., the cumulative total of over forty years of unsolved mysteries. Of the bodies that are found by police each year, about 1,000 remain unidentified by year's end. Many have been murdered. Police estimate that at least 100,000 people go missing each year; many of the missing are believed to be among the dead unidentified in the morgues.

In August, Congressman Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced legislation that would expedite the process of identifying the dead by funding an automated system called NAMUS (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System). NAMUS is a database established by the Department of Justice that holds physical information on missing persons and unidentified decedents. Often, much of the process of finding a missing person is matching physical characteristics with the information on a database of the dead. Many of these databases are scattered around the country. To date, information on 5924 of the 40,000 dead bodies has been entered into NAMUS.

The bill, which is scheduled for a judicial subcommittee hearing in Congress on December 15^th, is called "The Statute to Help Find the Missing" or "Billy's Law" (H.R. 3695), after Billy Smolinski, Jr., a missing person since 2004. Billy's mother, Jan Smolinski, a leading advocate for the bill, spoke at a Congressional press conference in August: "My son Billy vanished five years ago, and in our efforts to find him we opened a Pandora's Box of problems plaguing the world of the missing and the unidentified dead. Just about anything that could go wrong in the effort to find our son went wrong." Based on her experience, Smolinski has been pushing hard to pass the legislation.

Why has it taken so long to enter data on the 40,000 dead bodies into a database? During the years 2000-2009, over 100 million people have been fingerprinted in various other government programs such as U.S. VISIT, where foreign visitors to the U.S. are fingerprinted. It would seem that fingerprinting and collecting other physical data on 40,000 dead bodies would be a relatively simple task, but as mentioned information on only 5924 bodies has been entered into NAMUS. Progress in building the database is moving at a slow pace.

Source:

http://www.chrismurphy.house.gov/
http://namus.gov/index.htm