COLUMBUS – Franklin County authorities now have names to go with two unidentified bodies found in during the past three decades.
The state attorney general’s office says the lab at the Bureau of Criminal Identification used DNA to trace family members of a man who was found shot in the head on Lockbourne Road in 1992 and also used DNA to identify a man whose body was found in the Scioto River in 2006, according to attorney general Dave Yost.
The men were positively identified as Chow Chan and Randy Raines, according to a joint press release from Yost and Franklin County Coroner Nathaniel Overmire.
Chan’s body was found on Sept. 20, 1992, along Big Darby Creek in the vicinity of the 7000 block of Lockbourne Road, but DNA technology was in its infancy and a 1993 attempt to obtain a profile was unsuccessful, Yost said.
The Franklin County Coroner’s Office submitted remains of the then-unidentified man to BCI in 2000 and the bureau developed a DNA profile, but the case grew cold.
A comparison of the records of the coroner’s and sheriff’s office, which were digitized in 2019 and 2022, yielded the discovery of Chan’s parents, who lived in New York and had submitted DNA samples in 1993 to be compared to the body.
In January, BCI officials contacted detectives with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to obtain a DNA profile from the mother who had sought comparison in 1993 and reported in February that the DNA profile of the unidentified man was consistent with that of a biological child of Chan’s mother and the family was notified that Chan has been positively identified, Yost said.
DNA also helped authorities identify Raines as the man whose body was found in the Scioto River on March 30, 2006, Yost and Overmire said.
The coroner’s office in 2022 enlisted the help of the DNA Doe Project, a non-profit initiative that uses crowd-funding to cover the cost of advanced DNA extraction and genealogy work research to identify human remains.
A potential identity was developed and a DNA sample from the Raines’ brother was a match,.
The cause of Raines’ death was undetermined.