Naming the Unknown: How the LA Coroner Identifies the Dead

Some of the dead arrive with identification in their pockets. A driver’s license, a wallet, a phone with a lock screen photo that matches the face on the gurney. These are the easy cases.

Others arrive with nothing. No identification, no personal effects, no one waiting at the door to claim them. Decomposed remains found in remote canyons. Skeletal remains unearthed during construction. Burned bodies pulled from wildfire zones. Drowning victims recovered from the Pacific.

For the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office, identifying these unknown individuals is not a secondary task. It is a core mission, and the office has built one of the most comprehensive forensic identification operations in the country to carry it out.

The Tools

Forensic identification employs a hierarchy of methods, each with different strengths and limitations.

Fingerprints remain the gold standard when available. If the decedent’s prints are in any law enforcement database — from a prior arrest, a government background check, military service, or immigration processing — the match can be made quickly. The LA Coroner’s Office runs prints through both state and federal databases, including the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

But fingerprints require intact skin. Decomposition, burning, and prolonged water immersion can destroy ridge detail. Forensic specialists have developed techniques to rehydrate desiccated fingers, peel skin from decomposed hands, and even inject fluid beneath the skin to restore enough ridge detail for comparison. These techniques are painstaking and do not always succeed.

Dental records provide another pathway. Teeth are the most durable structures in the human body and survive conditions that destroy everything else. If the decedent had dental work — fillings, crowns, root canals, extractions — those records can be compared to dental X-rays obtained from potential matches.

The challenge is that dental comparison requires a candidate to compare against. Someone has to suspect that the unknown decedent might be a specific missing person, obtain that person’s dental records, and submit them for comparison. In Los Angeles County, where tens of thousands of people are reported missing each year, the pool of potential candidates is enormous.

DNA has revolutionized forensic identification over the past three decades. A sample from bone, tooth, or preserved tissue can generate a genetic profile that is compared against databases of missing persons and their family members. The FBI’s Combined DNA Index System and California’s state database contain hundreds of thousands of profiles.

Genetic genealogy — the technique that uses DNA to identify distant relatives through consumer genealogy databases — has added a powerful new tool. Cases that were unsolvable through traditional DNA comparison have been resolved by tracing family trees built from partial genetic matches. The same methodology that caught the Golden State Killer has been adapted for identifying unknown remains.

Forensic anthropology enters the picture when only skeletal remains are available. An anthropologist can determine the decedent’s sex, approximate age, ancestry, and stature from bone analysis. Healed fractures, surgical hardware, and skeletal anomalies can provide individualizing characteristics. These biological profiles narrow the pool of potential matches.

The Database

The office maintains detailed records of every unidentified case, including photographs, physical descriptions, dental charts, DNA profiles, clothing, tattoos, scars, and any personal effects found with the remains. These records are entered into national databases — the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and the National Crime Information Center — where they can be cross-referenced against missing person reports from across the country.

The digital infrastructure has improved dramatically over the decades. Cases that once existed only in paper files are now searchable electronically. Investigators across the country can query the databases and flag potential matches without traveling to Los Angeles.

But technology has not eliminated the human element. Many identifications still come from someone recognizing a photograph, a tattoo description, or a distinctive piece of clothing. The office has published information about unidentified cases through media appeals, social media, and websites dedicated to the unidentified dead.

The Cold Cases

Some identification cases go cold. The remains sit in storage — cataloged, sampled, and documented, but unnamed. Months pass. Then years. Then decades.

Los Angeles has hundreds of unidentified remains cases stretching back decades. Some are skeletal remains found in the vast undeveloped areas of the county — the Santa Monica Mountains, the Angeles National Forest, the desert edges of the Antelope Valley. Others are decomposed bodies recovered from the urban core, people who died alone and unknown in a city of millions.

Periodically, advances in technology reopen these cases. DNA techniques that did not exist when the remains were found can now extract profiles from degraded samples. Genetic genealogy can identify someone whose DNA was never in any database by finding their relatives. Isotope analysis of teeth and bone can narrow down where the person grew up and lived.

These cold case identifications are among the most quietly powerful things the office does. A set of bones found in 1985 finally gets a name in 2024. A family that has spent forty years wondering what happened to their missing relative finally gets an answer. The resolution rarely makes the news, but it closes a wound that has been open for a generation.

The Scale of the Problem

Los Angeles County’s size, diversity, and transient population make identification unusually challenging. People come to the city from everywhere — other states, other countries, other continents. They may have no local connections, no dental records in any accessible database, no family members who know they are missing.

The homeless population presents a particular challenge. Individuals living on the streets may have severed contact with family years or decades ago. When they die, no one files a missing person report. No one comes looking. The coroner’s office may be the only institution that attempts to establish who they were.

Immigration adds another dimension. Undocumented individuals who die in Los Angeles County may have no records in any U.S. database. Their families, who may be in another country, may not know how to contact American authorities or may fear doing so. The identification process for these cases often involves coordination with foreign consulates and international law enforcement.

The Commitment

The office does not give up on unidentified cases. They remain open, technically, forever. As long as the remains are in storage and the case file exists, the possibility of identification persists. New technologies, new database entries, new tips — any of these can break a case that has been dormant for years.

This commitment reflects something fundamental about the work. Every person has a name. Every person has a story. The forensic identification unit exists to make sure that even in death, in a county of ten million people, no one disappears without the system trying to find out who they were.