Suffern High School helps crack John Doe case

A Suffern High School student helped crack a more than 70-year-old John Doe case.

Bianca Rosembert

Apr 17, 2024, 2:36 AM

Updated 173 days ago

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A Suffern High School student helped crack a more than 70-year-old John Doe case.
Ethan Schwartz, a student at Ramapo College of New Jersey, was participating at a summer bootcamp.
Schwartz worked with the college's Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) team to solve the "Rock Collection John Doe" case.
Researchers were trying to identify the owner of a human jawbone.
It took Schwartz and the team fewer than two days to find a lead.
The IGG center connected the bone to a U.S. Marine Corps Captain Everett Leland Yager who died during a military training exercise in 1951.
Then, researchers took a DNA sample from the daughter of Capt. Yager to directly compare to the jaw bone profile and it came back a match.
Schwartz is the youngest person known to contribute to an IGG case.