Back in 1989, Marina Ramos was stabbed to death in California. Four days later, two infants, aged 2 months and 14 months, were found in a public bathroom. Nobody made the connection at the time. The children were eventually adopted and raised in what police call a "loving home."
The question of who killed Ramos and what happened to her children remained open, though, and recently police in Arizona (not sure why) decided to investigate the case using DNA. They eventually made a DNA match and identified the two women found in that bathroom as the missing daughters of Marina Ramos.
OK, impressive police work, but let me ask this: what impact will this have on the daughters? None of the news stories I have seen identify the daughters, which is proper, but that means we can't ask if knowing their mother was brutally murdered will make their lives better or worse.
They police say they hope this will help them find the mother's killer, but I can't see how.
Is this a case of "the truth has to be told"? Or is it just cruel poking at two women whose lives have already been messed up enough?
I have grave doubts that every old secret should be exposed, and I do not think we have thought nearly hard enough about what can be done with DNA studies that the people most directly involved have not consented to.
1 comment:
John, you're acting as if these two 36 year old women were somehow DNA tested without their knowledge or consent.
Now, I assume that the article has been updated since you read and posted it, since it currently contains information you noted as absent (such as names, which I will continue to omit while discussing here). But reading the article now, it explains what happened pretty well. (Even better when you open the link within the article to a statement by the Mojave County Sheriff's Office).
The mother's identity was not known originally. Her case wasn't just cold because the killer wasn't found, but also because she was a Jane Doe. They did have her fingerprints, and a sample of her DNA, but they couldn't match them to a known person at the time.
In 2022, the Special Investigations Unit was examining cases, and in reviewing the mother's case, they got access to whatever old database had those old fingerprint records, and forwarded them to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to be examined.
This resulted in a match - the police had arrested someone with those fingerprints for shoplifting in 1989. This arrest included a name, which turned out to be an alias. They worked to trace contacts for that fake name, and through following up leads were able to arrive at the victim's real name.
Now that the police had a real name, they were able to determine that the victim had been in possession of her two children, based both on public records and the testimony of people who knew her - and now there was the possibility of second cold case crime that needed investigation, their possible abduction. And that's on top of the the fact that (unknown to be connected at the time) the two foundling sisters' original abandonment was, itself, a cold case crime which needed to be solved.
That very fact is why the old DNA sample of the mother was able to be partially matched to that of the daughters - being foundlings, their own records were in police databases for the purpose of some day determining where they came from. Based on a partial match from the old databases, the police then reached out to them and followed up, and the sisters consented to being DNA tested to confirm the possible match, and a match was made.
This is all perfectly standard, unremarkable stuff in terms of police work.
"They police say they hope this will help them find the mother's killer, but I can't see how."
Having names of both the victim and her young daughters makes it possible to interview people who might have known her, even only tangentially, and ask them for details they might remember. Things like names can be vital for jogging important memories.
It goes unstated in the article and other link, but it seems implied that the father of the sisters is still unknown, and unfortunately odds are decent he may have a connection to the killing. If they can find someone - anyone at all - who can lead them to the identify of suspects like that, it might prove vital to bringing them to justice.
Maybe there was someone like a neighbor who didn't really know the family, was just an extremely casual acquaintance, and maybe didn't even know the mother's name... but maybe they knew the names of the infant girls, and maybe they also knew the name of the father, or someone else surrounding the events. There's every possibility now of solving the case and bringing the guilty to justice, if only a good lead can be found - and those can be found in the unlikeliest of places.
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