A man pulled from Coyote Creek in San Jose nearly three decades ago still has no name, and Santa Clara County coroner's officials are renewing their public plea for anyone who might recognize him. He was found floating face down, caught in a tree branch, in the water at Metcalf Park on June 14, 1997, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators are hoping a distinctive tattoo and a memorable shirt might finally break the case open.
The renewed appeal was detailed in a news release from the County of Santa Clara, which says the Santa Clara County Office of the Medical Examiner is working through a backlog of unidentified decedent cases using modern forensic technology, including this one. As reported by The Mercury News, the man was found in the water at Metcalf Park with tattoos and clothing distinct enough that officials believe someone out there could still identify him. The office serves the county's roughly 1.9 million residents and carries case number 97-165-004.
What Investigators Know About the Man
The man was estimated to have been between 35 and 45 years old, stood 5 feet 10 inches tall, and weighed 139 pounds, according to the coroner's release. He had brown hair, a short mustache, and natural teeth, and his race could not be determined. Per the same release, he was wearing black boots, khaki pants, and a short-sleeved floral shirt at the time he was found.
The most distinctive clue may be a tattoo: the letters B and J inked above his left breast. The California Department of Justice Physical Identification unit relies on markers exactly like this — chest tattoos and unusual clothing — to match unidentified remains against old missing person records, especially in cases where fingerprints or facial features have degraded beyond recognition.
A Trail Popular With Hikers Today
Metcalf Park sits along the Coyote Creek Trail, an 18.5-mile riparian corridor of freshwater lagoons, open fields, and parkland jointly managed by the City of San Jose and Santa Clara County Parks, according to the Bay Area Ridge Trail. Coyote Creek itself runs 31 miles from the Diablo Range down to San Francisco Bay, cutting through the same stretch of South San Jose where the man's body was recovered in 1997.
It is one of several waterways and greenbelts in the area that have drawn renewed attention from investigators. Just a day before the Coyote Creek appeal, San Jose police and the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner opened a separate investigation into human skeletal remains found off Santa Teresa Boulevard near the Coyote Valley greenbelt, a case Hoodline covered this week. The remote, rural terrain around Coyote Valley has allowed remains to go undiscovered for extended periods in the past.
State and Federal Databases in Play
The case has been entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System under case number UP127425. NamUs, administered by RTI International under the National Institute of Justice, is the nation's only federally legislated repository built to cross-reference unidentified remains against missing person files from across the country.
State law also backs the effort. Under California Penal Code Sections 14200 through 14215, the California Department of Justice's Missing and Unidentified Persons Section provides centralized physical, dental, and biometric cross-matching support to county coroners statewide — part of a program that traces back to California establishing the nation's first statewide dental identification system in 1979. Separately, law enforcement policy in the San Jose area calls for missing person reports to be entered into state databases immediately, with no mandatory waiting period, which is meant to help match old unidentified remains with reports filed decades ago.
A County With a Track Record on Cold Cases
Santa Clara County has cracked open decades-old identification mysteries before. In September 2024, the county's Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office identified remains found inside a 1994 railroad boxcar as 40-year-old Ian M. Shepard, resolving that case roughly three decades after his body was discovered. That earlier success is part of why officials say they're confident modern forensic tools can still deliver answers in cases as old as the Coyote Creek man's.
Whether a missing person report was ever filed for him in 1997, either locally or elsewhere, remains unknown. It's also unclear whether investigators have been able to extract usable DNA from his remains or what exactly the letters B and J were meant to signify. Anyone with information is asked to contact coroner investigators at 408-793-1903 or 408-793-1900, referencing either the local case number 97-165-004 or the NamUs identifier UP127425.
