It was a jaw-dropping find.
Twenty years ago, a young Arizona boy picked up an unusual looking rock for his collection.
On Tuesday, Ramapo College genealogy students confirmed that it wasn’t a rock at all, but a jawbone that once belonged to Captain Everett Leland Yager, a US Marine who was killed during a training exercise in California nearly 70 years ago.
The Mahwah, New Jersey college’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center (IGG) started working on identifying the fragment — still complete with several teeth — last year, when Arizona law enforcement handed it over.
The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office had held onto the jawbone since 2002, when the child’s parents noticed it sitting in their son’s rock collection and turned it in.
“But it was not a rock; it was a human jaw bone. For the time being, the bone belonged to Rock Collection John Doe,” Ramapo College said in a release.
Traditional DNA tracking yielded no results, but experts made some progress with whole genome sequencing, which produced a profile for a family tree.
That’s when the Ramapo students and a high school-aged intern — the youngest person known to have ever contributed to an IGG case — stepped in.
In just two days, they tracked down a “lead candidate” who closely matched the DNA profile of the jawbone, who as luck would have it, was the soldier’s daughter.
Last month the results of a DNA sample they collected from his daughter, whose name was not given, confirmed the Ramapo team had cracked the case: the jawbone was in fact Yager’s.
The Marine captain was killed in July of 1957 when his plane crashed during a training exercise in Riverside County, California.
Yager’s remains were thought to have been completely recovered at the time of the accident and were sent to his Missouri hometown for burial.
“No one is quite sure how the jaw bone ended up in Arizona since the accident took place in the air over California. One theory is that a scavenger, such as a bird, picked it up and eventually deposited it during its travels over Arizona,” the College said.
The boy’s parents couldn’t explain to police how, where, or when their son had picked up the bone, but officials said they assume it was recovered somewhere in Arizona.
