The casket containing an unknown victim of the June 1971 Tonti train crash was removed from the ground on Thursday morning at the East Lawn Cemetery. The partial remains of the body have been taken from the casket and later transferred to the Crouse Funeral Home in Salem, where Jennifer Randolph, who is in charge of case management and operations for the DNA Doe Project, says their work will begin.
“So our main goal today is to see if there is something in the available remains that we might be able to get a DNA sample from. So we are going to look at the remains carefully and select what we think has the best probability of offering us DNA,” Randolph continues, “ So Essentially we have to harvest or extract the DNA from the remains and that will allow us to determine the sex, ancestry, and hopefully the identity.”
Randolph explains how the samples are selected.
“We will do a careful and respectful examination of what we have. I am actually going to a conference in a forensic lab in California that specializes in very challenging samples, and we are going to select the elements we think are most likely to succeed. Then ship them to the lab in California, and they will do the work to extract the DNA and we will go from there. So that’s the first big hurdle is getting that sample.”
Randolph says that at this point, it is unclear what will happen to the remains.
“If we can identify next of kin, that would be up to them. If not, it would be up to the town to decide how to handle re-entering the individual. Hopefully they will have their name back. You know that’s why we do what we do, and there’s probably a family out there wondering what happened, and hopefully we can give them some answers.”
Merz Vault Company brought in equipment to unearth the coffin and constructed a structure above the grave to hoist it out of the ground. They were assisted by a sizeable crew from the Salem Public Works Department. The Tonti Train Crash resulted in 11 deaths and injured 163. Efforts at the time to learn the identity of one of the victims was unsuccessful. The remains were then buried as an unknown person in East Lawn Cemetery, where they have remained until Thursday morning.
Salem Public Works employees join Merz Vault Company in digging up the casket of an unknown victim of the 1971 Tonti Train Wreck on Thursday morning as work begins to identify the victim. Photo by Cole Wimberly.
