Anthro alumni search for answers in high-profile forensics cases By Deborah W. Morton
They are helpless to stave of a hurricane, a wild fre, or a drug deal turned deadly, but they are there in the grisly after-efects that defne their work as forensic anthropologists. Many graduates of Mercyhurst University’s master’s degree program in the Department of Applied Forensic Sciences are doing the kind of feld work that Dr. Dennis Dirkmaat and his colleagues prepared them to do in analyzing skeletal remains. Are they human? If so, was the person male or female? What about age, stature, geographic ancestry, and probable cause of death? They call it the “biological profle.” In the past year, a handful of those grads have been busy with high-profle cases. Last winter, Dirkmaat and alumnae Andrea Ost and Rhian Dunn, who spent the 2018-2019 academic year teaching in the same program from which they graduated, traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to put their skills to work in the morgue. Budget cuts in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (September 2017) left an overcrowded morgue and depleted professional staf to identify victims of the most destructive hurricane to
hit Puerto Rico in modern times. Dirkmaat was among the sought-after experts called upon to help by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD) and National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG). He, Ost, and Dunn volunteered their time and made the trip with fve other board- certifed forensic anthropologists, hailing from Washington, D.C., Missouri, Texas, New York, and Louisiana. As grad students at Mercyhurst, Dunn and Ost worked on dozens of cases, scenarios that typically included the retrieval of on- site remains and return to Mercyhurst for lab analysis. In San Juan, they worked fve days straight, sunup to sundown, in the disaster morgue, gratifed that they were able to use their skills to help close the remaining 47 cases there. Last fall, another Mercyhurst grad, Dr. Kyra Stull, was among a team tasked with identifying victims of the 215-square-mile Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Stull, who co-led a team of 10 students from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she is an assistant professor, is
accustomed to identifying burn victims from her years at Mercyhurst and beyond. She earned her doctorate from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Still, she told USA Today , nothing in her catalogue of crime scenes and disasters approached the scope of the damage she witnessed at Paradise. “I’ve never experienced anything like that before,” she said, although admittedly her Mercyhurst education was instrumental in preparing her. “Dr. Dirkmaat established a program that had the perfect mix of hands-on experience and classroom-based knowledge that resulted in competent anthropologists,” she said. “Additional experience working with the short courses he ofered each summer enabled us to learn from and work with some of the best in the feld as well as establish professional relationships.” Looking back, she said Mercyhurst ofered more than a rigorous academic program; the camaraderie among the forensic anthropology faculty and cohorts had its own perks. “I still work with, publish with, and am friends with
Forensic anthropologists Kyra Stull, left, and Tatiana Vlemincq walk through a trailer park destroyed by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Nov. 17, 2018. (Reuters/Terray Sylvester)
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