Medical Examiner’s Anthro team doesn’t always find welcome answers for families

Dead men Do tell stories.

When skeletal remains washed up near the Brooklyn Bridge in August – a skull; arm bones; partly ribs and vertebrae; Pelvic, leg and foot bones – the forensic medicine department commissioned its forensic anthropology department to carry out the examination.

The elite team, which handles about 150 cases a year, collected and cataloged the bones found on the rocky shore on three separate days before beginning to determine the person’s age, gender and ethnicity.

“It was a tricky scene,” said Dr. Angela Soler, an anthropologist on the ME team. “It’s a very rocky area with lots of crevasses.”

The shape and size of the bones – particularly the pelvic bones, which are smaller in men than in women – told the unit’s four specialists that the victim was a man.

The experts found no evidence of foul play.

They believe bone fragments found Thursday near Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park are from the same man.

Now they’re relying on his bones and clothing — Calvin Klein sweatpants, Five Star work boots and a red anklet — to figure out who the John Doe was and determine his cause of death.

The unit, which does most of its work in a nondescript 1960s government building on First Avenue in midtown Manhattan, represents the last chance for many families to solve the agonizing mystery of what happened to their loved ones some have been missing for decades.

Forensic investigators have quietly worked through 1,250 unsolved cases, most of them from the 1980s and 1990s.

“We didn’t have the same technology back then,” Soler said. “We didn’t even have the internet.”

One of the unsolved cases the team recently helped solve was that of a 16-year-old named “Midtown Jane Doe,” whose remains were found in 2003.

The girl had been tied up with electric cables and buried under the concrete basement floor of a building that once housed The Scene club, where Jimi Hendrix and The Velvet Underground performed.

A ring with the initials “PMcG” was also found.

“They had a young girl in Hell’s Kitchen wrapped in a carpet and buried under concrete,” Dr. Bradley Adams, the unit leader. “That was something we regularly withdrew.

“There were different types of tests that came into consideration, and that’s what we tried.”

The team extracts DNA from bones to aid identification. However, the method only works if the person’s DNA is already stored in CODIS, a national database that stores and compares DNA profiles from crime scenes and convicted criminals.

Jane Doe may have been identified as Patricia McGlone in April by experts using genetic genealogy.

Genetic genealogy uses a different, longer genetic profile called whole genome sequencing, Soler explained.

This profile can then be uploaded to public databases such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, where family members may have DNA files. The researchers do not use commercial websites like 23andMe.

“Because it’s a longer profile, you’re essentially able to find potential relatives further away,” Soler said. “We can go to a first cousin, a second cousin, a third cousin, aunts and uncles.”

“But the genealogy clues are clues,” said her colleague Adams. “They are not affirmative.”

His team searched for close relatives who could provide a DNA sample, but all of McGlone’s were dead.

They had planned to dig up her parents to get the sample they needed when the genealogist discovered that Jane Doe’s second cousin on her mother’s side was a victim of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th.

The 9/11 victim’s mother had sent a DNA sample to the coroner’s office, which was then able to determine that McGlone – who lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, before her disappearance in the late 1960s – was a match.

“We went crazy,” said Adams, who worked on the case during his more than two decades in the office. “It was like, ‘Now I can retire.’ It was one of those bucket list cases.”

The unit is also investigating the mystery of a woman whose remains were found wrapped in plastic and buried in concrete under a Tribeca nightclub in 2008.

The skeleton was found with heart-shaped earrings wrapped in a gum wrapper and a makeup bag containing lipstick, mascara, a key and a lighter, according to the case file on Namus.gov, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a free Online database.

She also had several coins from 1983 and 1984 on her, leading investigators to believe she went missing at that time.

The office is now processing the case using genetic genealogy.

However, some cases still remain elusive due to lack of evidence.

The discovery of a partial skull found in a Bronx parking lot in 2004, shortly after Adams opened his office, has so far baffled the team.

“It looks like part of a woman, but there are cut marks on the skull that almost look like scalp marks,” Adams said.

In April, the bureau identified a young woman whose remains were found floating in the East River on May 5, 2000, as Alexa Skolnitsky.

“We had absolutely no leads on her,” Soler said. “She was wearing the T-shirt of a ska-punk band called Perfect Thyroid.”

The team received a grant from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to fund the genetic genealogy tests, which can cost about $5,000 each.

A match was made, and Soler notified family members who had been searching for answers about Alexa’s whereabouts since 1999.

“You want to find your loved one alive, so it’s a little complicated because on the one hand you’re happy to have an answer, but on the other hand it’s a really unfortunate answer,” Soler said.

“It’s terrible news that the person you’ve been searching for for decades has passed away,” she said. “But there’s also this gratitude of now, you know.”