‘Missing Persons Day’ at Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office provides resources for families with missing loved ones
CHICAGO — On Saturday, an event at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office helped some families with missing loved ones find closure.
“Missing Persons Day” at the medical examiner’s office in Chicago offered families the chance to speak with law enforcement, the M.E.’s office, and other organizations all at once.
“This event we host it so that families who are missing a loved one for more than a month,” Chief Medical Examiner of Cook County Dr. Ponni Arunkumar said. “It simplifies all the processes for them.”
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Families were able to submit DNA samples to national missing person data systems and look at the M.E.’s online system.
“When we get a decedent, many times we know who they are, but sometimes we don’t. So for about 10-12 decedents every year we don’t know who they are,” Arunkumar said.
Dr. Arunkumar said two families were able to find closure on site, as their loved ones were unidentified at the office.
“We had a family come report a missing loved one from 2013 and we were able to match that information with the decedent at our office so they got closure after 11 years,” Arunkumar said.
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According to Arunkumar, another family from Berwyn also got closure.
“We also had another family able to identify one of the decedents we had in the recent weeks,” Arunkumar said.
Arunkumar said in that case, the missing person was a teen boy who was pulled from a canal in Summit, and while heartbreaking, she hopes families were able to walk away with the answers they need.
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