Hi Cindy. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Missing Endangered Person Information Clearinghouse (MEPIC) conducts long-term missing (LTM) case reviews. The LTM case is any case where the person is missing for an extended amount of time and all leads have been exhausted. Most of these cases are opened at the request of the law enforcement agency of jurisdiction. Our analysts conduct database checks on these LTM cases on a regular basis throughout the year. If further investigative needs are required, many of our inspectors or agents will assist with those cases.
The other part of our program involves the Unidentified Deceased Initiative, which I am a part of. We partner with our Florida Medical Examiners and law enforcement partners to identify the unidentified deceased. We have over 840 unidentified deceased in Florida. We look at all unidentified cases to include homicides, suicides, accidental deaths and natural deaths. As part of the program, we review unidentified cases and identify areas/gaps where these cases could benefit from forensic resources, such as exhumations, DNA analysis, forensic odontology, fingerprint submissions to state and federal fingerprint databases and facial reconstruction and composites. We also provide analytical resources, such as running potential names and aliases, conducting searches for tattoos, searching against various missing persons databases and running any other investigative leads available. While this program has been in existence for a while, we did not focus much of our efforts until November 2016 when we allotted two full-time positions to the program, a sworn inspector and an analyst. To date, we have identified 13 individuals through this program. While many of these individuals have been missing for years, a large majority of them were never documented as missing. We also assist with locating information on next of kin and assisting with obtaining DNA reference samples, if necessary. Once an identification is made, further assistance can be provided by our regional offices on the cold case homicides, if requested by the law enforcement agency. If you have any questions about how we run our program, please feel free to contact me: [email protected]