BOSTON, June 24, 2016—More than two years after unidentified human remains were recovered on Revere Beach, a DNA match through a national missing and unidentified persons database has provided a previously-missing man’s family with answers in his disappearance, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

The partial remains discovered in shallow water along the shoreline in 2014 have been conclusively identified as those of a 31-year-old man with ties to Oklahoma who had most recently been living in Cambridge. Prior to his last reported sighting in 2013, he wrote a letter to his family indicating that he was “going off the grid” and that they “would not see [him] again.”

Because the circumstances of the man’s death are not currently considered suspicious, his identity is not being released publicly.

Black, braided leather belt

State Police detectives assigned to Conley’s office responded to Revere Beach on April 30, 2014, where a passerby had spotted the remains along the shoreline at about 11:30 am.  State and Revere Police began efforts to identify the man and to contact his family.

The condition of the remains hindered investigators’ efforts to identify the man or determine his ethnicity, and forensic anthropologists could only opine that he was an adult between 20 and 40 years old – and likely on the younger end of that range. State Police detectives entered the unknown man’s DNA profile into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.

The man was wearing American Eagle brand blue jeans with a 30” waist, suggesting a slim build.  They were cinched with a black, braided, leather belt. Authorities released a photograph of that belt and of distinctive boxer shorts he was wearing that were patterned with the image of a Volkswagen Beetle.

Boxer shorts with image of Volkswagen Bug and surfboard

More than a year later, a tipster who saw those images contacted State Police detectives with information that the deceased may have been a man reported missing on Oct. 30, 2013. Now armed with a name, troopers contacted the NamUs regional system administrator for Massachusetts, who obtained a voluntary DNA sample from the tip subject’s father in Oklahoma. That sample proved a familial match after testing by the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.

“Receiving news of a family member’s death is always a painful event,” Conley said. “But with their years of waiting and wondering at an end, I hope this man’s loved ones can take some comfort knowing that their son and brother is at peace. I’m grateful to the State troopers, the NamUs personnel, and especially the Good Samaritan tipster involved in this investigation who helped bring answers to this young man’s family.”

Trooper Anthony Alestock led the investigation for the Suffolk County State Police Detective Unit, which has jurisdiction over death investigations in Chelsea, Revere, Winthrop, and certain parts of Boston. Lori Bruski, the NamUs regional system administrator for New England, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin, coordinated the DNA retrieval and analysis. For more information on NamUs, visit www.namus.gov/.

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