FGCU students working to identify baby in decades-old cold case

FORT MYERS, Fla.- A team of Florida Gulf Coast University students is working to solve a 30-year-old cold case involving the mysterious death of an infant who was found floating in a river on Florida’s East Coast back in the 1980s.

The forensic anthropologists are working with tiny bones and very limited documentation to figure out what happened to baby Moses.

Detectives with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office say in 1983, someone likely threw the baby off of a bridge just hours after he was born. The person responsible was never found and no parents or relatives were ever identified.

Thirty-three years later, the sheriff’s office re-opened the case, asking for the expertise of Dr. Heather Walsh-Haney and her graduate students at FGCU.

The team drove to the East Coast and immediately got to work, exhuming the body of baby Moses from a Stuart cemetery, but investigators found another surprise. Baby Moses wasn’t the only infant’s body buried, two other babies were buried nearby around the same time, with no names, no records and no headstones.

“The issue really became, not only are we focused on baby Moses, but we wanted to make sure that the other infants were exhumed in order to help the medical examiner’s office and law enforcement put names with those unidentified babies,” Walsh-Haney said.

With such a unique set of circumstances in the case, the FGCU students say this is the experience of a lifetime.

“Working with subadult or juvenile remains is very uncommon in the field and being able to have the opportunity to work in such a case is an amazing experience,” said student Dayanira Lopez.

Now, Walsh-Haney says they’ve just about finished the job set before them, “as I talk with you now, we are wrapping up our analysis on this case and I plan to generate a report in the next couple of weeks with our ultimate findings.”

Walsh-Haney adds the ultimate goal is to match a DNA profile to one that law enforcement has already generated, as well as identifying the other infants buried in the cemetery.