Firefighters responding to reports of a bonfire at Pescadero State Beach on July 24, 2020, found a man’s charred remains in the flames. More than six years later, San Mateo County investigators still don’t know who he was, and they’ve released previously undisclosed details from the case in hopes someone can finally put a name to him.
San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office investigators believe the man built the bonfire himself and died by self-immolation, according to SFGATE. He died during some of the most restrictive COVID-19 lockdown days of 2020, and how he reached the beach remains unclear — the stretch of coast has no public transit access. The case has been logged under number 20-05503, and the sheriff’s office is asking anyone who may know the man’s identity to come forward.
Investigators believe the man was between 30 and 65 years old when he died, but his remains were too damaged to reveal much more about him. What he left behind is the clearest trace of who he might have been: a pair of EU size 43 black boots, a green duffel bag holding a white metal key on a red keychain, a small Starlight Candle-brand candle, and a black headscarf patterned with medium-sized white dots and the letters GS.
DNA Testing Points to Iranian Ancestry
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office has been working with Wolf Pack DNA on the case, and the group tested the man’s DNA. According to testing cited by SFGATE, the results suggest the man was of Iranian descent, possibly with ties to eastern Mediterranean regions or Tehran’s Zoroastrian community. Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions, emerging in Iran well before the rise of Christianity, and fewer than 30,000 adherents are believed to still live in the country.
Despite that genetic lead, Wolf Pack DNA researchers have not found a match in large databases such as GEDmatch, per the SFGATE report. Genetic genealogy work like this relies on publicly submitted DNA profiles for comparison, and GEDmatch users must specifically opt in to law-enforcement matching for their kits to be eligible to match ones uploaded by a medical examiner’s office. Diana Monnette, identified as the group’s assistant director, said Wolf Pack DNA has since shifted its focus toward community outreach, sharing information about the case on platforms such as Reddit and Facebook in hopes of jogging someone’s memory of the beach events from that night. Monnette has urged people to consider uploading their own DNA test kits to GEDmatch and DNA Justice to widen the pool of potential matches.
How San Mateo County Handles Unidentified Cases
The unidentified man’s case fits into a broader system San Mateo County uses to try to put names to the dead. The county posts unidentified-person cases publicly, saying the goal is to increase the odds that someone recognizes a detail from the case. According to the County of San Mateo, “The purpose of placing these cases on our site is to increase access to the public with hopes that someone might have knowledge about the identification of any one of these individuals.” The county also maintains these profiles in the National Institute of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs. A case listed in NamUs as UP158357 shows an unidentified person found in Pescadero, California, with a body-found date of July 24, 2020, matching the timeline of the beach fire.
Families of missing people can also ask law enforcement to submit DNA from immediate relatives to the Department of Justice, which then compares those profiles against unidentified persons nationwide. The county’s identification process typically also includes dental records alongside DNA samples, a method the coroner’s office has used for years, as the Mercury News reported in 2011. At one point, San Mateo County had more than 20 unidentified bodies in its caseload, some dating back to the 1970s. One notable success came in 2005, when investigators identified a man whose torso, missing its head, forearms and lower legs, had washed ashore in Pescadero back in 1987, according to the same Mercury News report.
How to Help
Anyone with information about the man’s identity is asked to contact the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office at 650-599-1536. Questions about the remains themselves can be directed to the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office at 650-312-5562. Pescadero State Beach, where the fire was discovered, does not permit beach fires under state park rules, though that restriction did not prevent the blaze that claimed the unidentified man’s life six years ago.
