We usually talk about big-deal issues and people in these entries but there are times when an issue overlooked in the rush of great thoughts about great issues catches the eye.  Such is the case with Ethan Colbert’s piece in the September 17 Post-Dispatch about the exhumation in Jefferson County of an unidentified man found in the Mississippi River thirty years ago.

On one hand, it’s about how DNA technology not available then will help identify him now. He was naked except for a pair of socks, with no tattoos or other easily-identifiable features or injuries.  On the other hand, it’s a story of how government works, or can work, on behalf of the people, especially the least of us. And you don’t get much more “least’ than this man.

Colbert reported Missouri cemeteries hold the remains of more than 115 unidentified men, women, and children, “such as the female toddler found inside a suitcase in 1968 along the riverbank in West Alton in St. Charles County, date back decades.Others are far more recent, including an infant who was found in July 2019 inside a freezer inside an abandoned St. Louis city residence. The boy, wrapped in a blanket, was wearing a diaper and a ‘Winnie the Pooh’ onesie.”

Authorities and the news media did all they could do thirty years ago to identify the man pulled from the river.  They combed missing person reports, published and broadcast information about a 160-pound man, 5-10, with a three-day beard. His fingerprints didn’t match any records at the state or federal levels. Nobody called the sheriff’s office to say the man’s description resembled someone they knew.

Some of these nameless people might be those whose families long ago filed missing person reports. Some might be victims of a crime whose perpetrator has been eliminated by the passage of time. They deserve to be known, as do all of us.

Colbert relates how State Representative Tricia Byrnes of Wentzville met with some families of missing people and then got $1.5 million put into the state budget requiring the state to pay the costs of exhuming and of identifying those John and Jane Does.

Highway Patrol Sergeant Eric Brown, speaking for the Patrol, told Colbert private labs that specialize in this kind of cold cases will have to be hired because none of the state labors has the equipment needed.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department spent $1,700 of its own money to exhume the body of the unidentified man and it still hasn’t found a laboratory to do the DNA work, which is expected to cost another $2,300.  Once a lab is found, it could take as much as six months to finish its inquiry.

But few would doubt the value of spending $4,000 to resolve a family’s questions or of giving someone a name for a proper stone that marks their existence.

Sometimes the effort succeeds. Colbert recalled a 2022 case in St. Louis County when investigators learned a man had been missing since 1994 from Moline Illinois.  His family released a statement saying the discovery would provide “comfort to us and his friends.”

DNA technology has vastly improved in thirty years and the amount of DNA in various systems has partnered with that technology to solve lot of mysteries.  Private DNA repositories such as those available through Ancestry.com and other commercial ancestry companies have been used to identify victims of crime and their perpetrators as well as missing persons.

It is time consuming work, not much like the stuff we see on television where it seems DNA evidence can be processed within an hour-long program.

Missouri is investing a small amount of money in an effort to answer long-held painful questions asked by many people. Representative Byrnes’ legislation is an infinitesimal part of the $50-Billion state budget. But it might turn out to be the most important part of it to a lot of folks, living and dead.

It is so easy to think of government as a massive, faceless, unemotional entity.  But what it really is, is thousands and thousands of small and very human stories. Perhaps we will someday hear who this man in Jefferson County was. And maybe, someday, we’ll learn who the suitcase baby and the freezer child in the Winnie the Pooh onesie were.  And why somebody gave up on them.