COLUMBIA, S.C. — A South Carolina family finally has some feeling of closure after spending nearly 35 years wondering what happened to their loved one.
Michael Benjamin Davis was born in Richland County in 1965.
After growing up in Columbia, Davis moved with his family to Canada, then spent time in California and eventually joined a traveling carnival somewhere in the Midwest.
By 1988, his family had lost track of his whereabouts. Then, in 1993, children playing in a farmer’s field near Greenwood, Indiana, discovered what were later determined to be human bones. Fast forward over 30 years, and that field is now a golf course. DNA technology has revealed that the bones found by those children belong to Michael Benjamin Davis.
Michael Vogen is with Othram, a company that uses a first-of-its-kind DNA system to help law enforcement solve cold cases.
"We look at hundreds of thousands of markers of DNA to basically build these high-performing profiles that can then be used for a number of different tools. And you can use these profiles, if done the correct way, to detect very distant relationships in these databases and then reverse engineer your way back to the direct family from which the DNA originated, and that’s what we did in Michael’s case,” Vogen said.
Vogen said Othram compared Davis’s DNA with samples from several public databases including 23andMe.
After Davis’s remains had been identified, Johnson County, IN Chief Deputy Coroner Derek Wilson and Assistant Deputy Coroner Valerie Castro contacted Davis’s surviving relatives.
"You know, it’s the call that we wait on. We were wondering, who was this person? You know, you wonder, who is he, what was he like? What did he do? And we had to put ourselves in his shoes and look at things like it was 1993 again,” Wilson said.
Thursday, Laurie Pineda traveled to Greenwood, Indiana, from Florence to collect her cousin’s remains.
"We may not know what Michael's last days were like or how he came to his demise. But we know it's him now, and our family can rest assured. We're not wondering and searching or worrying anymore. So, for that, we're deeply grateful to everyone," Pineda said.
The Greenwood Police Department says the investigation into Davis’s death is not over.
They hope that with the public’s help, they can fill in the missing pieces of Davis’s final days.