Two squirrel hunters found the remains of a human skull Sunday near a dry creek bed off McCoy Byrnes Road in East Feliciana Parish.
Detective Don McKey said no other bones were found in the area. After Coroner Michael DeJohn confirmed it was a human skull, the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff Talmadge Bunch turned the skull in to the University.
McKey said he brought the skull Monday to the University’s Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services for the laboratory to determine the person’s identity.
Mary Manhein, director of the FACES laboratory, has handled more than 600 forensic cases as a forensic anthropologist. She said the laboratory gets many cases like this where they have no idea who the individual might be.
“By law, we are supposed to get cases like that,” she said.
Manhein said a team of five anthropologists and one facial forensic sculptor has begun the evaluation process. She said the remains were easily identified as a human skull, but because of decomposition, this is not always the case. She said the team will try to give law enforcement an estimate of how long the skull has been exposed to the earth’s elements and if there was any head trauma at the time of death.
“First, we will evaluate the remains brought to us and try to determine the person’s age, sex, time since death, trauma and ancestry,” she said. “If we have a person we think it might be and there are no x-rays available, we try to use DNA to identify them.”
Manhein said the timeline for establishing the initial profile of the remains can stretch from one day to several weeks. After getting an initial profile, she said the team will try to develop a positive identification through X-rays, DNA and available dental records. She said this could take months to a year.
Manhein said the FACES laboratory gets about 50 cases of unidentified remains each year.
“Sometimes we get one bone or sometimes a full body,” she said. “We can give a positive identification to the remains fairly often, but not every time though.”
—-Contact Natalie Messina at [email protected]