James Smith
Experts have confirmed that a human jaw that was mysteriously discovered in a child’s rock collection belonged to a United States Marine who died during military service more than 70 years ago. The identification was made thanks to the work of a group of college students and a high school intern who may be the youngest person to help solve a genetic genealogy case.
U.S. Marine Corps Captain Everett Leland Yager was killed in a military training exercise in July 1951, according to a report. Press release issued this week by Ramapo College, the New Jersey institution where students tested his jaw and eventually linked it to him. A separation declaration of the college’s Center for Investigative Genetic Genealogy noted that the military exercise involved a plane crash, although it did not provide more details than that.
Ramapo College
The accident that left Yager dead happened in California, and experts said his remains were later recovered in the state’s Riverside County and buried in Palmyra, Missouri. At the time, it was assumed that all of the remains had been recovered and buried. But decades later, in 2002, a human jaw containing several teeth was submitted to local authorities in northern Arizona, where a boy’s parents believed their son had collected the bone before mistakenly adding it to his collection. stones.
The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office performed basic DNA testing on the bone, authorities said, although initial tests yielded no clues about who the remains might have belonged to. Because there were no samples in government databases that matched the bone, investigation of the remains marked “John Doe Stone Collection” went on hiatus that would last another 20 years or more.
Sheriff’s investigators and the Yavapai County coroner referred the unsolved case to Ramapo College’s genetic genealogy center in January 2023. With help from a Texas laboratory specializing in missing and unidentified persons and a forensic laboratory in Utah, the jawbone was given a genetic profile. which could then be added to online genealogical databases.
In July of that year, students who participated in a college bootcamp focused on investigative genetic genealogy had the opportunity to work on the case as part of the course. Along with a center intern who was still in high school, the group of college students developed a lead and sent their findings to the sheriff’s office in Arizona. Finally, last March, testing of a DNA sample from Yager’s daughter was compared to the jaw sample, confirming the former Marine’s identity.
“No one knows for sure how the jaw ended up in Arizona since the accident occurred in the air over California. One theory is that a scavenger, such as a bird, picked it up and eventually deposited it during its travels through Arizona,” Ramapo College officials said in this week’s press release.
The intern who assisted last summer’s group of students, Ethan Schwartz, may be the youngest person to help solve a genetic genealogy investigative case, according to the release.
