Detroit's Unidentified Dead: Operation UNITED

Meillä täällä satollaan yksi sanonta, kun on parhaimmillaan kotona, on parhaimmillaan elämässä. Sitä varten meillä on talo-mestorit apunasi, pihapiirin luotto-kaverit. Ei tarvitse kotona ihan kaikesta stressata. Muokra huolehton kotii. Sato, Pistefi. Mitkä sä vasta hoi? Aina huvattimnut, lidu, sekannattaa. Tämä on tullut hankaan haluaa, auttaa aapsi ja exhumation. Tässä on tullut hankaan. Lähdellä, kuten vähä ja käsin, biologi-anthropologista Dr. Amy Michael, iv nyt pe specs on koko início. Ja nyt meidän onö - tehllä ovat siis ainakaan tieton eduk Harvard- ja 7 kaikki koittampeisksiin haluala elokkä Usei. Tämä on tämän nimi, edinni on seuraavaksi, joten on seuraavaksi ja DNA. Tämä on seuraavaksi, että onkoin poliisksiin tämän ja jone, joten onkoin koko vuotta. Tämä on seuraavaksi, että onkoin koko vuotta koko vuotta ja koko vuotta, joten onkoin koko vuotta koko vuotta, joten onkoin koko vuotta, joten onkoin metro-area ja joten onkoin koko vuotta koko vuotta, joten onkoin koko vuotta koko vuotta. Tämä on seuraavaksi ja koko vuotta koko vuotta, joten onkoin koko vuotta koko vuotta, joten onkoin koko vuotta koko vuotta, joten onkoin koko vuotta -Selvää. -Selvää. Getting the logistics piece ready, getting all of the personnel lined up, all of the tools and equipment necessary that we need to be able to do mass examinations and really move the project along so that we don't have any downtime. We're using every minute of every workday that we possibly can to get our teams out there actively digging and finding the individuals that we need on our list. The prep work that goes into United doesn't just happen a month or a week or so before the first dig week, but we continually prep all year long. On the Detroit Police Department side of the house, they're constantly working on making sure that these individuals are still missing that they were not identified throughout the year. And they're getting the case files scrubbed and ready to pass over to us from there. We create a unique numbering system for each victim get them compiled into a list. Figure out where they are geographically right now we operate in two different cemeteries one of the cemeteries is in Canton, Michigan and the other cemetery is in plummethe, Michigan. So we have to divide a per workload and make sure that we have the right number of individuals on each side so that we have a full staff on our docket to basically exume for the summer. As you approach this project, did you hope that identification of victims would also close their homicide cases was that of equal concern or was identification the primary goal and then the homicide case was the second step. This is Shannon. So that's a simple and not so simple answer of missing person case and a homicide case are both equally primary goals. I have the job of locating missing persons or comparing them to unidentified remains as well as I'm in charge of Detroit's cold case homicides. So as soon as we have an unidentified homicide victim that's identified it's it still stays with me. So I do have that relationship with that case where I want to identify the victim to possibly give me some leads. And then I have the other aspect where it's a missing person case that I know this family has been struggling struggling and we may already know it was a homicide. But we still haven't found those remains to give an example. The 1995 case once the victim was identified. The file was re looked into and we scrub through any evidence that we possibly had and we submitted that evidence for testing that we didn't have a 95 so from that we were able to get a suspect profile. Knowing who the victim was you don't understand who that suspect profile is but once you identify your victim and then you see your suspect and you see that there was a relationship there. You know it does help to close that or move move that case now back forward and move it from cold back into an active homicide investigation. So we've had two cases that directly from the identification have led us to suspects and persons of interest. This is lastly. The identification of the victims. Definitely helps jumpstart the homicide investigation without having that critical piece. We can't do the victimology that we need to do in order to potentially identify the suspect. So being able to have that knowledge of who was that individual. How did that individual live their life? What types of things were they known to do? Did they have jobs? Did they have family members that cared about them? Did they engage in risky behavior? Did they live just an normal life and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Being able to really put that name to who that person was. Definitely helps enhance what we can do in the development of suspects moving forward. Regent Larson walked us through some of the practicalities of running such a large operation and how DNA sampling works in operation united. I know you've involved anthropologists and the work that you're doing with operation united. Can you talk to me a little bit about their role? I know that our listeners are familiar at this point with the kind of skeletal analysis that happens in the lab. But the field work that you're performing is pretty different and for practical reasons. So to lay the groundwork on what operation united looks and feels like. Imagine a very large cemetery where we bring in a huge amount of personnel. We set them all up in an organized fashion. We create what we refer to as dig teams, which are individual teams comprised of between six and 10 people. We're made up of both FBI body farm trained individuals. These are folks that go and study at the body farm at the University of Tennessee. Their experts in human remains recovery. And then we also include members of law enforcement, which includes Detroit police department personnel on our teams. So these folks go out. They get a case file and they get some generalized directions on where to find the person that they're looking for to do their examination. Once they start, they start removing the dirt. They get down to the human remains. They have clues within their file that may say things like we're looking for a male. We're looking for a female in this age range. The person may or may not be varied with certain specific pieces of clothing. They may have a medical implant. They may be missing a limb. They could have a very distinct set of teeth. And once the dig teams have that set of remains exposed, it looks like it's kind of lining up with the packet of information that they have to work with. They call over one of our forensic anthropologists and that individual then comes to the specific dig site. They also review the file. They review the remains in front of them. We're looking for a confirmation to make sure that we definitely have the right individual. Once they do that, then the anthropologist works with us to select the right bones for DNA sampling. And we go from there and we get the bones out and we get them labeled and packaged and then recorded or cataloged into our system. We're lucky enough in the state of Michigan to have a wide variety of forensic anthropologists available and interested in operation united where they travel in from Northern Michigan University, which is in the upper peninsula of Michigan all the way through different universities throughout the state of Michigan. They also bring graduate students or students that they've vetted that are excelling in the study of forensic anthropology so that they're able to get true hands on experience. There's not that many clandestine graves that are out there that require the anthropologist to come right out to the scene. But when we are working through united and we're exposing 20 individuals on a time, this is the perfect training ground for these anthropologists to work and get great field hours. It's great opportunity for the students to get some really hands on experience with the forensic anthropologist that they are studying under. The anthropologist starting from 2019, we started off with two and those were the anthropologists that assist at the Wayne County Medical Examiner. I think that year we realized we have these radios and all you hear is I need an answer will hear an answer will hear. And we were running them, you know, they're running so much that because of relationships with them and with other anthropologists, they reach out to different partners as well. We now have, I think, seven or eight different anthropologists that we can use to where we actually can schedule, you know, X amount for this week and not have to worry so much about being shorthand with it. So their role is very critical and helping us to confirm that the remains that we are collecting are in fact going to be our victim. We've talked to our listeners about potters fields or areas and cemeteries were unidentified and unclean persons are buried. How that's handled in each city, county, region, how it can vary widely and exclamation or excavation and identification processes that aren't necessarily going to be a simple thing. I know that I've attended an exclamation in a state where the burial laws made it really easy for authorities and medical examiners to locate the decedent, but in another case, it took weeks to identify where the decedent might be. And then they were in an area with several other decedents and even then it wasn't necessarily clear which remains belong to which decedent. It took the examination of the burial containers because those standards had changed over years death records, a lot of different aspects had to go into the basics before one could even move into the individual identification and in operation united you're working with a number of cemeteries and victims. And I'm assuming they've been buried in various manners depending on the decade and the regulations. How have you handled those complexities. This is lastly. When I pitched this to our office for support to send our teams out to go do this, and we got out there and we dug a few holes and we didn't find the right individual and we had to go dig some more holes. One of my bosses made a comment of, well, how hard is it to find a dead guy in the cemetery? And that really put it in perspective, I had to sit down and really go back and explain to our management that it is can be extremely difficult to find somebody specific that we are looking for. There's not an instrument really that is rated that is essentially a people finder underground like you would find a fish finder on water where you can just send the radar down and boom, there's your person. In the cemeteries, they are placed in areas where they're available at the time. Sometimes they're placed off to the side away from paying customers. They may be placed in some undesirable areas within the cemetery. The burial records aren't necessarily digitized, so we have to go through and really look at the records that we have to work off of. One of these records could be waterlogged, they could be burned in edges. In one instance, we had a chart that was drawn on the back of a flat piece of wood. And that was our treasure map that we had to operate on to try to figure out exactly where the person was that we needed. Then you go out and you start to really learn the ground and you learn who is operating the cemetery at the time that these individuals were buried. So sometimes they are buried and they're six feet down in the ground and sometimes they're buried more than 10 feet down in the ground. And sometimes they could be a much closer to the top of the surface where they may only be two feet down in the ground. Barial laws have changed throughout time in Michigan. And during certain points in time, individuals may be required to be in a concrete vault, which is essentially a big concrete hollowed out box. And then you place the individual in the concrete vault. They could also have required the concrete vault plus the individual being in a pine box or being in a fancier coffin. And then we're in the times where we are currently where things are a lot more eco friendly. And then there are these options to have green funerals out there where essentially the whole is dog and the person is placed in the hole without any type of pine box or concrete vault or distinct markers. So we've had to learn in dealing with the two cemeteries that we work with. How is the cemetery laid out? Does it make sense how it's laid out? What types of maps do they have and records have they kept throughout the years? And it just takes a lot of time to really figure it out and read the ground, if you will. One of the strengths that we've noticed over the last couple years with United is bringing back the same team leaders to run the dig teams has been extremely effective. These individuals get assigned to roughly the same parts of the cemeteries every single year. And they really really get to learn the ground. They learn the individuals around them. They learn the burial trends that they're seeing in the ground, meaning that maybe the patch of individuals laid out in front of them is roughly at the six point mark. Or they know that they have to be more careful in the area that they're in and that these individuals are more at the two feet mark. Cemeteries just like any other cemetery is where the ground adds and flows where the trees are growing and changing the ground around them. And over time pine boxes to celebrate into the ground and where you would have an individual that was fully fleshed placed in the ground. There could be a mound over it and then over time that individual decomposes and that leaves a concave to mark in the ground that we can really kind of use as a defined marker in there. We've definitely taken us quite a long time to feel comfortable operating in the cemeteries. We now have great relationships with both cemeteries where we've gone in we've had meetings with them. We've explained that we're going to come back during set time periods that we will have search warrants for these individuals that we will be operating in these specific areas. We really don't want to impede their ability to continue their business. So they have active burials and funerals and things that are occurring in the cemeteries while we're out there. So we have to be as mindful and careful as we can so that we don't disrupt an already stressful time period for those families that are currently bearing somebody. I think Leslie did touch properly on how things have changed where it went from the person was placed in the ground to the vaults to back into the ground now. So the two cemeteries that we deal with one cemetery primarily we noticed our victims are all placed inside vaults. There's a few that may not be an evolved and that's usually from the later years. The other cemetery that we do nobody is involved and I think our oldest case that we're looking at and to correct you real quick on the numbers Detroit runs an average of about 200 unidentified persons. So it appears that every time I identify somebody then we get another case where somebody is unidentified and you know our goal is to obviously knock off a huge chunk of that through this project and one thing that we notice is. I think when they buried people back then I would like to think that they didn't know obviously nobody thought we were going to be coming back out and trying to do this mass exhumation because we could use DNA to ID them. So there was some recklessness probably way back in the earlier years and we're talking to 50 60 70s these were bodies that were unclaimed and unidentified that were placed out into these powder fields or county burial slots where 10 people would be brought out one day in the following day there would be six or seven more. So one of the challenges that we notice we've faced where you're taking these victims out there. I don't think they ever thought that we're going to come back out and try collecting DNA on them. Maybe they would have had better record keeping back then which would have made our job easier but we do catch breaks when we get the DNA hit and we identify that person. We do a lot of math which anybody who doesn't do math you will need it forever. We do a lot of math to do the measurements from where that person was recovered and then we're able to locate the ones that we couldn't find in between. So every year we have been more successful and actually locating our victims to where our project will have some end where we are successful in finding everybody. So when you're taking the samples for DNA processing you're using the FBI labs right. We're using a combination in the early years we use the University of North Texas and we sent our samples there. They had to close due to some funding issues during COVID so then we switched to using the FBI laboratory right now. The FBI laboratory has all of our samples from 2021 part of our samples from 2020 and I anticipate the majority of them for the 2022 season will also go there as well. What DNA databases are the results being entered into right now we're using codeus and namus. Could it be also run through public DNA database like Jedmatch or could that be a possibility for the future. Forensic genetic genealogy is on our list of things to do once we get the DNA profile built from the FBI laboratory. We will be selecting cases to be further explored for a positive identification using the genealogy tools that are out there. Can you talk to us about some of the identifications that have been made via Operation United. So far how many victims have been identified currently we have successfully identified nine cases through DNA. We had three additional cases that we identified through fingerprints on this past list of cases that we were looking at. The identifications that have been made well I can't get into details on the specific cases I can give you a little bit about different families and how it has helped them. The first case which aired it's there's actually a new story that they had interviewed this young man and his story is back in 1987 his mom left he was told always that she left and went to the store and that she didn't come back. 2016 he came to one of the missing and missing and events we host a event every year from families of missing people where they can come and they can submit DNA or they can redo a report we've noticed that there's a lot of. a lot of times where somebody may have been reported missing back in the 80s or 90s. However, none of that was kept electronic, so it's hard to sometimes locate those actual physical paper reports. So if we are unable to locate them, the family, we'll do another report that way we have that in the system and then we collect their DNA. So he had actually come to us in 2016 and submitted his DNA. Nothing obviously came back because we didn't have his mom's profile uploaded. And in 2019, we did 13 successful excimations of homicide victims specifically. And one of those cases ended up coming back to being his mom, who is Anita Wiley. This was something I think that tormented him for years about where his mom was. In his heart, he knew that she didn't just leave. This is one of the cases that kind of led us to some suspects who are currently in prison for other murders, very similar to the way that she was murdered. So we've been working on trying to close that case with that identification and those possible leads. Another successful story is, you know, these are not all people who are from Detroit. We have another family that had their brother at the time who was missing, but he was from a suburb city outside of Detroit. And several years ago, the daughter of this man, she wasn't even born at the time. So she was, I wanna say like five or six months gestation before she was even born when her father disappeared and then throughout the years, you know, she's never really gotten any clear answers. When she became an adult, she submitted her DNA and we also exhumed him in 2019. So there's other victims that come from other states or other cities that we may have recovered that were making those identifications and helping those families to have some closure on that end as well. It's amazing from the Detroit Police Department and the FBI, you know, starting this off, when people hear about it, they're calling, they're, they wanna come out, the same teams wanna come back again. You know, you gotta have a certain passion for this type of work. A lot of these agents that come here from other states take time away from their families to come up here because it is such a dedicated project and it's a rewarding project. And then we have all our local agencies who don't even have a stake in it. They don't have a missing person that they're looking for, but they volunteer some manpower or they come out and they help dig, they help pass stuff out from the little things to restaurants donating to make sure that everybody has, you know, something to eat and drink. So we're not burdened when we're there. Just an overwhelming amount of support from local departments and community relations that you make. - Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. There's 57 agencies that have currently participated in Operation United. I had to add them up for something that we were working on recently. So to have 57 agencies and this year, I'm sure that number will grow. Come out every year to support us is phenomenal. - I'd love to see this in Atlanta. - I think it would be great. We're not out there saying that we've done everything correct, you know, we're really kind of paving the way in this because there's not a playbook that was written and how to do these big mass examations for this common goal, but we can certainly share our stories of successes and failures in our path to find all of these individuals, for sure. So having this continue in other cities would be fantastic. (soft music) - Next, we spoke with some of the anthropological team members who volunteered their time to assist in examining decedents and confirming that they match up with the packets of information provided by law enforcement. These packets are made up of all available information on the unidentified decedents. Their biological profiles, which include presumed race estimation, sex estimation, age estimation, as well as information on stature. There may also be mention of identifying details like clothing, medical implants, injuries, or other factors that can aid the anthropologists in assuring that they're collecting samples from the proper individuals. Dr. Carolyn Isaac from Michigan State University began by explaining the basic role of anthropologist on scene. We'll also hear from PhD student, Michaela Spiros and Dr. Jamie Lequem of forensic applied research services, LLC. In Operation United, forensic anthropologists were really responsible for performing field skeletal analyses to assess whether the exhumed decedents biological profile or other unique features match that of the person that we were searching for. And then once we felt confident that we had found the correct individual, we would assess which bones would potentially be the best for DNA analysis. This is Jamie Lee. That's important too because unknowns or unclaimed or unidentified individuals could be interred or buried on the same day in essentially the same location side by side, but we're unsure the order. That's why the anthropologists need to go in and confirm that everything matches up with the records of the specific individual that we're looking for. We talked to law enforcement about some of the difficulty of locating decedents burial locations based on the cemetery records. By the time that you came in for excavation had the locations been established. Mrs. Michaela, the locations have been established in a preliminary sense. When we were told which area we were to begin our excavation, we were given markers of where the law enforcement had already predetermined where they think these cemetery burials had been for the individuals we were looking for. Unfortunately, that was not always the case. So there was a little bit of exploration that occurred once we began the excavation itself. This is Jamie Lee. Dr. Moore and I, she's another anthropologist on the team actually just submitted a paper on some of these logistical challenges. When entering the cemetery and it's going to very based on cemetery and you can see this sort of pattern of they'll have unknowns or unclaimed individuals usually buried along the edges, the permutters of the cemetery or buried along roads within the cemetery, but again buried together in groups. So like Michaela was saying, we would have a general idea usually based on the cemetery maps and records that they keep. But sometimes those records over time change, owners change records might be off by a few feet. And when you have individuals buried side by side, a few feet matter. And that was part of the preliminary work going on was getting those records, looking at them, getting the preliminary location. And then once we did sort of know, okay, one of the people we're looking for is in location A, maybe that's five yards off to the east than where we thought it was. The whole cemetery map can be kind of shifted and you can reorient yourself to get yourself a little bit closer for the next individual. So it was an iterative process of looking at the maps and kind of shifting ourselves based on where people were. - This is Carolyn. I was just going to add that like Jamie Lee mentioned previously, oftentimes multiple individuals were buried at the same time, either individuals who are unidentified or unclaimed. And so you would potentially go into that plot but you would know what order, like she said, what order those individuals would be in. So you might find an individual whose demographic profile clearly did not match the person you were looking for, but it may match someone else who was supposed to be buried within that group. So then from there you would kind of decide, am I at least in the right general area and maybe I just move to the next person over or does this demographic profile not match anybody that's supposed to be in this area and then you kind of have to go back to the drawing board and reanalyze where you think you are. - As clarification for our listeners, the words Eximation and Excavation have both been used in coverage of Operation United. But I'd like to get a little more specific in terms of the field operations. In many unidentified persons cases, a full Eximation takes place. Can you explain the difference here? - This is Jamie Lee. When I think of Eximation and Excavation, I do talk about them a little bit differently. Generally speaking, when I talk about an Eximation of Remains, you're gonna dig down and get to that individual, Remove the. remains from the location, sometimes to go back to a lab for analysis. Sometimes not, when I think of excavation, I tend to talk about this more in terms of using archaeological methods to get down to the remains. Along with that, there's usually mapping and sketching and photography and things of that nature. And what I would say with Operation United is it's a little bit in between or a little bit of both depending on how well the individuals are preserved. This is Michaela. I think something that was a little different for these excavations is because it was such a large process trying to identify multiple individuals. We were taking just single bones for DNA analysis. So there are different types of excavations. One where an entire skeleton is taken back to a lab for a full biological profile and trauma workup. Or in this case, when they have the resources to just take a single bone for DNA analysis and incorporate that into the namus process in order to try to begin the identification process of an individual. And so for this process, we were able to really just try to match those biological profiles with the individuals throughout the excavation so that we did not have to take the entire individual out of the ground to be taken back to a lab for analysis. So to kind of build on that, what are some of the logistical issues that have come up for you as you've done this on the ground skeletal analysis? This is Carolyn. So I think one of the biggest differences from doing a traditional laboratory analysis is that when we were working with Operation United, sometimes the skeletal material was really degraded or damaged. So the traditional bones that we would use for estimating the biological profile were not available. So then we didn't have necessarily all our reference materials or our computer programs with us. So we had to rely on our brains to remember some of those methods that we don't use as often to determine things like sex and age and ancestry. So at times like this, I was extremely thankful to have some wonderful forensic anthropology colleagues as well as some great grad students who are far smarter than I am to help out and to kind of troubleshoot areas and approaches that we could take with the skeletal remains. This is mainly going into the field to do the analysis is very different because in a lab there's time to clean everything. There's time to lay everything out, take measurements, analyze those with software or as others have mentioned, compare it to reference materials before we make our determination, we can use multiple methods to confirm that our sex estimation is on point or age estimation is within an appropriate range. You don't have the luxury of that amount of time to do it in. You don't have, as has been mentioned, you don't have all the reference resources or the computer technology is. So logistically, it really was about sort of modifying your crime scene bag or your go bag or your archeology kit, whatever you might call it. So we did have some laminated reference sheets because also part of the process is going through decontamination. So anything we brought out had to be able to go through the decontamination process as well. So laminated reference sheets, whatever tools could be brought into the field to use for taking measurements, bringing those in and sort of making our own little kits that would travel with us. And then as Carolyn mentioned, being able to really touch base with each other and compare notes because again, you know, different anthropologists are going to have different areas of specialization and different comfort levels and different skill levels. And so that was really great to from a logistical standpoint. So when we're looking at the packets of information, most of what we have are going to be autopsy reports from the medical examiner, there's sometimes but not always accompanied by odontology reports, by an odontologist. Sometimes there are dental notations from the medical examiner, but not a forensic dentist. We're looking for those. We also have case information provided by NAMES or that might be associated with any type of law enforcement file. When we're actually trying to see if our paperwork aligns with the individual that's going to be sample for DNA, one of the things at least that I like to do is if the dentition is present, start with the dental records. And that works out really well if an odontologist especially created a report that accompanies it or if the medical examiner did a very thorough dental documentation. Sometimes there's also radiographs or ex-rays of dentition with it or photos. Some individuals have very unique dental modifications that also helped with that. So that's what I like to start with and then working through the bio profile. Also though a sort of different thing in this context is we can also look at the material artifacts with the individual. So if the paperwork states, the clothing they were found in or any personal effects that might have been interred with their remains, then also that helps us know we're on the right track too. Along with that too, those case documents are going to note if there's any type of trauma that the medical examiner observes and we can also at least see if that trauma is consistent with their remains. This is the Kayla. I think this is an important aspect of our training as anthropologists to also understand that the medical examiner is recording what they believe is the biology of an individual. And as anthropologists we know that gender and race or cultural contracts that will not necessarily reflect the biology of what we're seeing and especially in these cases where we only have certain elements present. And then we are using more contextual evidence that we find in the grave with the individual. Those are all things that we can add to start trying to make sure that we are getting the correct identification of the individual or the presumptive identification of the individual based on this contextual evidence. When we requested interviews with all three anthropologists, Dr. Kim thought it would be important to discuss humanitarian identification, which is particularly important and interesting. And that's because we're more used to hearing that term in the context of mass disasters or wars, say in a mass grave after a civil war or in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the World Trade Centers Collapse or the 2011 earthquake in tsunami in Japan. We asked Dr. Kim to explain how she relates the concept to America's and more specifically Detroit's unidentified victims. So with the increased interest in humanitarian identification, I think you're right in that that's usually discussed in sort of global diasporas or like mass movements of people fleeing from warfare where mass movements have been generated. In the aftermath of disasters, there's identification processes. We see with the refugee crisis in the US, Mexico borderlands, similar identification. And I think this really does apply in the US domestically when we're looking at especially issues of poverty and structural violence or systemic violence. And when I see that, I just mean we have policies and laws and practices embedded in our culture that keep marginalized groups marginalized. And I think part of those marginalized we're seeing are the unidentified and not just because they're unidentified, but also there's sociocultural issues that have come up like the missing and murdered indigenous women and other groups. They don't get the same level of attention and effort and care maybe as other groups. So I see that still as a humanitarian issue when we're looking at cold cases or they unidentified because you're looking at groups that are often also marginalized, but then now we have the resources and technology to potentially identify them. So just due to their place and time, if they died in the 70s or the 80s, or even the early 2000s, the technology might not have really been in place to do this sort of identification process. And we're seeing those correlations to between sociocultural issues and those who are frequently not identified right away. Those who are sort of lost in the system, right? The homeless, the impoverished rentaways, individuals like that. So I do think they all fit together. This is Carolyn. I think it's easy for us to think of this as a problem that other countries or other places face, but the truth is that there are so many unidentified individuals in our own backyard. I mean, you take a quick look at Namus. The number of missing people and the number of unidentified people is quite surprising. And like Jamie Lee said, I often these are the individuals from marginalized communities who are mistreated not only in life, but then they lose their identities in death. So this project is obviously addressing a huge need and a major gap. Your students are actually able to participate in this to some degree. What do you hope to learn? This is Carolyn. One of the biggest things that I hope my students learn is the value of these other professionals working on their team and working together for such an important project, and to appreciate the diversity of talents within a group like this. I think we all agreed that we would love to bring those backhoe operators with us to every excavation because the precision of their work was really a thing of beauty. Also the team leaders who Jamie Lee just spoke about who were able to organize these groups and also change tact and change strategies when we had to give them the bad news that I don't think this is the right person. And of course the various law enforcement officers from the Detroit Police Department and the FBI who came out day after day, a lot of them volunteered, but they're going really outside of their normal duties, dressing in Tyvek and working hard and getting dirty and us sweating. So it was just a really amazing project to be a part of because of all of the just outstanding individuals that we had the opportunity to work with. And I hope that they saw this the expertise and the very intelligence of everybody within the project and realized how kind of special that was and how extremely important it was for this project to be a success. This is Jamie Lee bringing students out into the field. ICS, a huge opportunity also for networking that FBI evidence response team, they're all cross-trained. So the vast majority evidence response is not what they do all the time, which means there's DNA analysts in the field, there's forensic accountants out in the field, there are public relations officers, forensic photographers out there and for multiple organizations. So it's just a really great opportunity during the day as the executions are taking place for students to get to know these folks and network and also learn and understand about cross-training, about internal movement within an organization like that, the FBI for careers. All of that is going to help with that moving forward in their careers, but then also seeing firsthand on the ground what an automation process looks like of the scale, how different organizations can coordinate for a project like this. The huge amount of work that goes into it versus sort of what you read about in the classrooms. The students I bring out are not anthropology students, they're in either forensic sciences or criminal justice. So for them they have to apply the anthropology skills that I've taught them and their classes that are not their primary career track, which they have done quite well so far, not done with, and they get to network with other folks doing the types of jobs that they're aspiring to do. So Michaela, from the PhD student perspective, can you talk to me a little bit about the value of your experience working on Operation United? Most field work this extensive isn't something that a future anthropologist will experience in so far as it's taking place so close to home. It's something you have to sort of go farther afield to get. Absolutely. So every opportunity for field work is invaluable as each experience is so unique. The context environments of recoveries and estimations can vary dramatically even within individual forensic casework. As Carolyn briefly mentioned, it is also a learning experience working collaboratively with all of the different institutions. So understanding the dynamics of each organization and the wide variety of skills that every individual brought to the field from logistics to excavation to analysis was really impressive to see. I have been involved in quite a few of recoveries here at Michigan State, which always range from case to case as well, but this was my first time personally working to aid in a mass exclamation process for identification. So it was really great to see the organizations all working together who did not work together all the time. So it with so many different people involved the application of teamwork at such a large spectrum was really impressive and the respect between all of the workers at Operation United was really a very cool experience to see work each day. Thanks so much to Sergeant Jones, Special Agent Larson, Michaela Spiros, and Doctors Kim and Isaac for joining us to discuss Operation United. We would love to see similar programs in other cities across the country, especially with the integration of forensic genealogy that opportunities for case resolution would be incredible. If you know of a case that should be covered on the fall line, there's a link to our case submission form in the show notes. Thank you for listening. The fall line is a fully independent show and we appreciate listener support. 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