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Sunday's Daily News ran a story on the L.A. County Coroner websites that try to match up an identity or relatives to the thousands of unclosed cases on the rolls. The Unclaimed Persons List gives the name and some personal details on the 3,825 dead whose indentities are known. Shorter but more gruesome, the Unidentified Persons List has a photo and a little case history of each deceased who has yet to be traced. (Only click if you are ready to see faces of the dead.) Every year about 400 unidentified dead come in. I can believe it. When I toured the coroner's "service floor" a couple of years ago, cadavers wrapped in plastic sheeting tied off with heavy rope were piled up seemingly everywhere. It takes a few days to get the smell off your skin and out of your mind, and longer to forget the tiny plastic bundles stored in cold stainless-steel boxes that sort of resemble the cubbies where kindergarten kids stow their sweaters. From the DN story:
Inspired by a similar Web site run by Mexican authorities in Tijuana, the county coroner last year set up a virtual morgue, complete with photos of the deceased and a description of when, where and how they were found.So far, the macabre site has been credited with identifying two bodies and leading family and friends to claim the remains of 10 others.
That may not sound like a huge accomplishment, if you consider the county - home to one of the nation's busiest morgues - has had some 3,000 unclaimed remains since the early 1990s.But the three investigators are confident it will lead to more identifications and claims.
"We're going back a lot more, putting in older cases," Machian said. "We've had a couple of hits on it. We expect to get more hits as people become more aware of it."
At LAVoice.org, Mack Reed takes a spin through the lists.