Rockland Teen Helps Solve Human Jawbone Cold Case

SUFFERN, NY — When a kid in Arizona out collecting rocks found a human jawbone, Yavapai County officials were at a loss — until someone connected with researchers in the relatively new field of forensic genetics.

One of those researchers was Ethan Schwartz, a junior at Suffern High School and an intern at the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College.

It took less than two days to produce a lead for the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office, which within a year had confirmed that the jawbone belonged to U.S. Marine Corps Captain Everett Leland Yager, who had died in a military training exercise in July 1951. All of his remains were recovered in the Riverside County, California area and buried in Palmyra, Missouri — or at least thought to have been.

Schwartz, 16, is reportedly the youngest person to ever contribute to an investigative genetic genealogy case resolution, IGG Center officials said.

The center at Ramapo College is the first of its kind in the world, combining traditional genealogy and genetic genealogy to provide investigative leads in cases involving violent crime and unidentified human remains.

The jawbone, known formally as Rock Collection John Doe, became the focus for the IGG Center's summer bootcamp after the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office and Yavapai County Medical Examiner referred the case in January of 2023.

That May, the North Texas Center for Human Identification sent the extract to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City, where whole genome sequencing and bioinformatics were performed. A profile was developed and uploaded to GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA.

In July, students in the Bootcamp worked on the case. It took them, along with Schwartz, fewer than two days to produce a candidate lead which was then handed over to Yavapai County. The following month, a DNA sample was taken from the daughter of Capt. Yager to directly compare to the jaw bone profile.

In March 2024, the DNA sample from Capt. Yager's daughter confirmed a parent/child relationship, resolving the case and confirming that Rock Collection John Doe was indeed Capt. Everett Leland Yager.

"This is the first case resolution performed by the IGG’s summer bootcamp student cohort, and
New York resident and Suffern High School student Ethan Schwartz is reportedly the youngest
person to ever contribute to an investigative genetic genealogy case resolution. This case was a lesson in expecting the unexpected," said Cairenn Binder, assistant director of the IGG Center. “The team that worked on this case at our IGG bootcamp included some truly outstanding researchers, and we are so proud of them for helping to repatriate Captain Yager's remains and return them to his family."

IGG Bootcamp, a week-long summer session on campus, is connected to the college's IGG certification program.

"We started the IGG Bootcamp to give individuals who have IGG knowledge and experience the ability to hone their skills in an intensive environment where they work alongside each other on real IGG cases," center Director David Gurney, Assistant Professor of Law & Society, told Patch. "Because it takes place in our secure IGG Lab, individuals in the IGG Bootcamp are able to work on cases of violent crime and wrongful conviction, in addition to cases involving unidentified human remains."

Schwartz said the bootcamp seemed like an awesome opportunity.

"Over the course of the previous school year, I had been reading numerous articles of cases being solved with IGG technology. The opportunity to work on a case myself seemed surreal and I also was super excited to learn how the real case process works. Most descriptions in the news just give basic steps of how IGG works without real detail, so I left with much more knowledge of the case process.

Schwartz is a student in STIR, Suffern High School's three-year Scientific and Technological Investigative Research program. The course is sponsored by The State University of New York at Albany and provides students with an opportunity to do authentic original research under the guidance and tutelage of a high school and college/university/ professional mentor. Students submit their research projects to various competitions on the regional, state, and national levels.

"In terms of my research project for the STIR class at my school, I am investigating the factor of race/ethnicity in the success of IGG cases," Schwartz told Patch. "As genealogical databases are disproportionately skewed with people of Western European heritage, it makes it much more difficult to solve IGG cases with people of underrepresented races. I aim to analyze the factor of race in my research paper using multiple factors of the case process."

He found the field of IGG to be fascinating. "So many intersections with various other fields, including the more scientific genetics/biology people, traditional genealogists, well as the legal/law enforcement realm," he said. "In the future I would like to continue with IGG in any way I can; however, as such a niche field, there is no general 'path' to take in terms of a college major. The legal aspect is something very interesting to me, as David Gurney at Ramapo is a professor of law and has written/co-authored many journals on the legalities of IGG and the idea of a formal accreditation board."

Meanwhile, plans are being made to reunite the remains with the family, Ramapo College officials said. No one is quite sure how the jaw bone ended up in Arizona since the accident took place in the air over California. One theory is that a scavenger, such a bird, picked it up and eventually deposited it during its travels over Arizona.