Families favor bill for DNA database

SALEM - Their faces were everywhere - first on fliers passed out in their hometown, then on billboards on the side of the highway, and later, plastered across the cover of People magazine and in constant rotation on CNN.

And then they were gone, Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, the classmates and dance squad members from Oregon City whose bodies were uncovered in August 2002, buried in a sadistic neighbor's backyard, after months of searching.

This would have been the month that the two graduated from high school.

Instead, their mothers have joined with other families across the nation who have lived in limbo, not knowing whether spouses and siblings are dead or alive, to press for passage of new laws on how police should handle missing person cases.

Their proposal - which is under consideration in Oregon, Connecticut, Indiana and New Jersey - centers on the nearly 50,000 unidentified bodies housed at morgues across the country, even as an estimated 105,000 missing persons cases remain open.

Under the bill, police departments would be directed to send DNA samples from bodies that remain unidentified after 30 days to a federally funded lab in Texas, where they'd be entered into a national database.

Additionally, families could choose to submit their own DNA samples, or a baby tooth or lock of hair belonging to a loved one who had been missing for more than a month, to the same database. The idea is to cross-check the data, and find matches.

Lending her name to the bill has made some painful memories flood back, said Lori Pond, who remembers the earliest days of her daughter's disappearance, when police thought 12-year-old Ashley Pond might be a runaway, and she was faced with printing out her own fliers and handing them out on the streets of their hometown.

"There are times it brings up the loss of my daughter, but I am hoping for good to come out of all of this," Pond said.

Michelle Duffy, the mother of 13-year-old Miranda Gaddis, said that in an odd way, she and Pond were the lucky ones; their daughters' case had that mysterious alchemy that vaulted their story into the national spotlight. And when the girls' bodies were found, their families didn't have to wait more than 24 hours for a positive identification.

But hundreds of people disappear every month, and their faces flicker on the local news for a night or two and then go dark, she said, and their families never get the same kind of resolution.

"If the kids wouldn't have disappeared in the same way, from the same place, no one would have cared," Duffy said.

Nationally, similar legislation already is in place in Colorado, Washington state and Washington, D.C., said Kelly Jolkowski, one of the founders of the Campaign for the Missing, whose 19-year-old son disappeared without a trace three years ago from their home in Nebraska. Future campaigns are being organized in Missouri, New York, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, she said.

"How do I know some body in some morgue somewhere isn't my son, and they just didn't get the DNA from his body, so I will never know?" Jolkowski asked..

In Oregon, local police worked with missing person advocates on the bill, said Kevin Campbell, the executive director of the Oregon Association of Chiefs of Police.

Last Tuesday, the day Oregon House members unanimously passed the bill, was the third anniversary of the day that 21-year-old Domingo Ramirez disappeared from his home in Southern Oregon, headed out on a camping trip.

His mother, Yvonne Company of Selma, has been searching for him ever since. She said her hope is that the new legislation would lead to the identification of his body, and perhaps, a conviction of his killers.

"So many things can come when they find the remains," she said.