About My--Former-- Human ID Lab

    I was very fortunate to have been the Director of the Tarrant County Medical Examiner District’s (T.C.M.E.D.) Human ID Lab.  This Lab is tasked with attempting to make a positive identification of the 900 or so individuals presented to our office each year as “unidentified.”  Our official jurisdiction includes Tarrant, Parker, Denton, and Johnson counties in north Texas, and we have M.E. offices located in the cities of Fort Worth, Weatherford, Denton, and Cleburne.  Our official jurisdiction covers approximately 3,600 square miles with a population growing towards 3 million folks.  We also serve as the forensic laboratory for many other counties in the north-central Texas region.

   This webpage is not an official presentation of T.C.M.E.D. nor any other organization.  The information and opinions presented here are mine and mine alone, and may not represent the official position of T.C.M.E.D. or Tarrant County.  Any errors or omissions are my responsibility alone.  Again, this webpage is NOT presented to be an official page of T.C.M.E.D.

   Our Human ID Lab full-time staff consised of a well-experienced fingerprint examiner, a forensic anthropologist, and a board-certified forensic odontologist--yours truly.  We were lucky also to be able to call on another latent print examiner from our Crime Lab as back-up.  To the best of our knowledge, we were the only true stand-alone ID Lab in any medical examiner’s office in this country. 

   The only certification in human identification that I could find anywhere in the world is offered in London by the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine--a scion of the Royal College of Physicians.  I went over and took the course, qualified to take their examination, passed it, wrote a dissertation, and was awarded a Diploma in Forensic Human Identification--so I'm entitled to used the appelation "Dip-FHID" after my name if I wish.  I believe I am the only person currently in the U.S. actually certified in forensic human identification.  I am very proud of that diploma--it was a pretty damned difficult exam.

   We were very lucky to have an Automated Fingerprint Identification Service (A.F.I.S.) terminal in-house as well as access to I.A.F.I.S. and the T.C.I.C./N.C.I.C. system in our Lab.  Roughly 90% of our unidentified remains cases were resolved by fingerprint analysis, about 5% by dental records and dental radiograph comparison, about 2% by anthropological analysis and medical radiograph comparison, and less than 2% by DNA analysis.  I am very proud of the job that our ID Lab did, and most years we were able to positively ID over 99% of the unidentified decedents we examine.  Since I started with the M.E.'s office in 2004, I have supervised the forensic identification of more than 8,500 unidentified individuals by various methods, and have personally performed more than 400 dental identifications.  In the 25 or so years that my first mentor, Rodney Crow DDS, was at the office before me plus the 16+ years that I was at the office, we never had a misidentification (at least none that we are aware of!) from dental or fingerprint means.  I fear that because of the way things are now in forensics, however, I am obligated to disclose that there were at least two mis-calls that I am aware of by an anthropologist.

   Deceased persons would come to our office as “unidentified” for a number of reasons: severe trauma to the face or head, decomposition, thermal damage to the remains from fire, decedent had no form of ID on him/her at time of death, and various other reasons.

   In Texas only a Medical Examiner or Judge can legally certify the identity of a decedent.  My lab, therefore, made a recommendation about the identity of a decedent to the M.E./Judge who can then accept or reject that recommendation.  Any lab in Texas presenting itself as a "Human ID Lab" that is not affiliated with an M.E.'s office cannot be a true Human ID Lab as they have neither statutory jurisdiction nor an appropriate official to certify an identity determination.

   Our District operates under §49.25 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.  The Code does not explicitly say that we shall attempt to identify unidentified bodies, but it is implied and this job has traditionally been a duty of medical examiners and coroners for hundreds of years since the time of the English "crowners" before the Norman Conquest.  We felt it is simply a part of basic human dignity that we make all best-faith efforts to attempt to make a positive ID on anyone presented to us as “unidentified,” and we took this job very seriously.  We treated everyone exactly the same without regard to status or his/her station in life while s/he was alive--after all, nearly all the time we didn't know the person's status when they were living because we didn't know who they were.

   Some of the "big" events one might recall in connection with our office would be the Delta 1141 plane crash at D/FW Airport in 1988, and the Mount Carmel/David Koresh incident from Waco, Texas, in 1993.  We are very appreciative of the many hours of hard work performed by volunteers from the Fort Worth District Dental Society during these incidents.  A few of us also did assist with the Delta 191 crash at D/FW in 1985, but that crash was on the Dallas side of the airport and so the Dallas County M.E. had jurisdiction (the Tarrant-Dallas county line runs through the airport--some runways are in Dallas Co. and some are in Tarrant Co.) 

Above: the dental ID team for the Delta 1141 incident at D/FW Airport in 1988.  Below:  the dental ID team for the David Koresh-Mount Carmel incident from Waco, Texas, in 1993.  These teams were made up of trained volunteers from the Fort Worth District Dental Society.

   I had 10 years' worth of data on the zip codes where the unidentified folks who were brought to our morgue had been found.  In a class I'm taking in my PhD program at Oklahoma State, we were introduced to the ArcGIS Pro mapping program by Dr. Chelsea Bullard.  So I put my data into ArcGIS and here's what I found:

Fig. 1. "Heat map" showing frequency (darker colors) by zip code of unidentified remains presented to TCME in the years 2004-2014.

And we can focus in a little closer on just the North Central area of Texas:

Fig. 2. "Heat map" showing frequency (darker colors) by zip code of unidentified remains presented to TCME in the years 2004-2014 showing Tarrant County and areas west.

 Contact information:

Roger D. Metcalf, DDS, JD

PO Box 137442

Fort Worth, Texas

76136-1442

+1-817-371-3312

Back in the day.....