Proposed Legislation Would Address The Problem of Identifying 40,000 Dead Bodies

At any given time in the United States, at least 100,000 people are missing and at least 40,000 dead bodies or remains have not been identified. The unidentified bodies, which by one estimate number 60,000, are scattered around the morgues of the country. Based on experience, police believe that many of the missing are actually among the unidentified dead at the morgues, but the process of matching the missing with the unidentified dead is slow.

Congressman Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced legislation in August designed to  improve the situation by providing funding for the NAMUS database – the database that was established to make it easier for families to find information about their missing loved ones. To date, information about only 5775 of the 40,000 – 60,000 unidentified dead has been entered into the system.

Why has information on only 5775 of the unidentified dead been entered into the system? A funding cut in 2007 certainly didn’t help. Still, American government can fingerprint 100 million people over the course of five years; it would seem that collecting information on only 40,000 dead bodies would not be as big a challenge.

The bill, called “Billy’s Law”, is named after Billy Smolinski of Waterbury, Connecticut, who went missing on August 24, 2004. Smolinski’s mother Janice spoke at the press conference where the bill was introduced: “My son Billy vanished five years ago, and in our efforts to find him we opened a Pandora’s Box of problems plaguing the world of the missing and the unidentified dead.  Just about anything that could go wrong in the effort to find our son went wrong.  Law enforcement training has to catch up with science and technology and Congressman Murphy’s act will ensure that it does.”

The bill is also known as the “Help Find the Missing Act” (H.R. 3695).