PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The City of Philadelphia hosted a free event to help families solve loved ones’ missing persons cases across the city.
The city’s first Missing Persons Day took place Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Temple University’s Howard Gittis Student Center. The city encouraged family members of missing loved ones to attend.
Various stations were set up where people could meet with professionals from the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD), the Medical Examiner’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office, all with the overall goal of trying to resolve unidentified remains and missing person cases.
“If they wanted to turn in photos or medical records, it will be based kind of like a job fair,” explained Detective Kathryn Gordon with the PPD’s Special Victims Unit. “It’s all in a hope that we will be able to resolve some of these cases and meet with the families.”
Family members could also voluntarily give authorities a DNA sample that will be compared to unidentified remains already in their database.
Ryan Gallagher, criminalistics unit manager for the PPD’s Office of Forensic Science, said DNA data could help move cases along.
“Their DNA samples can be directly compared to that of maybe unidentified remains that have been found, so it’s not necessarily the toothbrush or hairbrush from the missing person,” he said.
According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database, more than 600,000 people go missing each year, and 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered.