Florida Gulf Coast University team working on identification
On the morning of Friday, May 29, construction workers discovered partial human skeletal remains in a wooded lot off Leonard Reid Avenue in Sarasota, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office reported on June 1.
Only one set of remains was found, a news release points out.
“Members of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office Crime Scene Unit, Criminal Investigations Section, Emergency Response Team, and Sarasota K9 Search and Rescue were on scene throughout the weekend,” searching the wooded area in an effort “to locate additional remains and any potential evidence,” the release continues.
Representatives of Florida Gulf Coast University’s Human Identity & Trauma Analysis program and the District 12 Medical Examiner’s Office — which serves Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties — were brought in on Sunday to coordinate efforts to locate and identify the remains,” the release adds. As of the morning of June 1, the release continues, the approximate age, sex, manner of death, and how long the remains have been at the site had not been determined.
The university is located in Fort Myers. Its website explains that, as part of its Master of Science in Forensic Studies program, “The Human Identify and Trauma Analysis concentration integrates the theory, practice, and methods used in medicolegal death investigations involving forensic techniques related to identification, crime scene investigation and documentation, the estimation of postmortem interval, ante- and [pre-death] trauma analysis, criminal justice theory, statistics, and GIS [geographic information systems].”
A Sarasota News Leader review of an aerial map of Leonard Reid Avenue found that the street runs north-south, between Myrtle Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Newtown.
As of late morning on Wednesday, June 3, in response to a News Leader inquiry, Douglas Johnson, creative communications specialist with the Sheriff’s Office, reported in an email that no new information was available for release. “The remains are with the Florida Gulf Coast University’s Human Identity & Trauma Analysis Team, where they are attempting to determine the identity of the individual,” he added.
Anyone with information regarding this case is being asked to contact the Sheriff’s Office’s Criminal Investigations Section at 941-861-4900.