There were parts of two bodies removed from a casket of an unknown victim of the Amtrak train wreck at Tonti.
The person coordinating the effort to identify the unknown person, Henry Morton, says DNA has been successfully captured from both bodies and the DNA is now being synchronized to be put into the DNA data bases. He is hopeful they will find a match for both remains, but that could take from just a few more days to a few months to determine.
Morton says the work so far has also provided more information on the two persons.
“One of the people is an adult woman of African American descent, they were able to tell,” Morton said. “The other is for sure a three- to five-year-old child. However, the demographics on (the child) have not been confirmed yet. Based off of when we actually did the exhumation and examined the remains, based visually off of what we were able tell… it seems likely that they are female and of Caucasian descent, I believe.”
Morton says there are still a lot of unknowns.
“It’s very likely that at least one of these people’s remains that we found there belongs to somebody who was identified and killed in the wreck. There are the other remains in there, it’s hard to say which one, that possibly might belong to an unidentified person. I think it’s very unlikely that there are two unidentified bodies. It’s not impossible, but it seems more likely that maybe one is identified, and one has not been identified. There’s also the possibility that both of them have been identified and these remains, these parts of their body, just never got returned to them in the whole chaos of the situation.”
Morton says so far, no hiccups have developed in the process to cause concern.
The Tonti train wreck took 11 lives in addition to the unidentified remains. Another 163 were injured.
Morton undertook the project with the underwriting of the Salem Tourism Commission.
