After 28 years, a man brutally killed in Atlanta has been identified as David Brown. The FOX 5 Atlanta reports that Brown was the victim of a heinous attack in 1996, where he was set on fire following a suspected robbery. The identification was made possible through the work of the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit focused on solving cold cases.
On the fateful day in 1996, Brown was found on Lansing Street in southeast Atlanta, severely burned and without any form of identification. Despite his critical condition and the efforts of neighbors to save him, Brown died at the hospital. At the time of the incident, the severity of the burns left him unrecognizable, and his identity remained a mystery for years, leading to his case file being marked as "Fulton County John Doe".
In a turn of events, the DNA Doe Project came on board at the referral of the Find Our Missing Facebook group in October 2023. They collaborated with the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office to extract a preserved DNA sample from the remains; a procedure that eventually paved the way for solving the nearly three-decade-old case. "We are proud to have been able to finally identify him after so many years," team co-leader Rebecca Somerhalder told AJC.
The DNA Doe Project faced the daunting task of reconstructing Brown's family tree from distant and long-dead relatives due to the absence of records before 1870, a common challenge in African American genealogical research. We discovered an ancestor from the 19th century who was born in Lincoln County, GA, but later died in Atlanta. This led us to hypothesize that our John Doe had deep family ties to Atlanta and may have been born there," genetic genealogist Lance Daly was quoted by FOX 5 Atlanta. Over the following months, using DNA databases such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, the team managed to trace back to Brown's immediate family, confirming his identity.
