Body recovered from Lake Washington in 2018 identified
SEATTLE - The body of a man recovered from Lake Washington in 2018 has finally been identified, thanks to years of investigation by forensic scientists and detectives.
Investigators have identified the deceased as 53-year-old Angel Arroyo Hernandez, who was found in Lake Washington near Mercer Island in May 2018.
His cause of death was drowning, but the manner has since remained undetermined.
Mercer Island Police investigated the case for years but struggled to find leads, and in 2021 they reached out to the DNA Doe Project for a genetic genealogy investigation. Researchers took a blood sample from the body and uploaded a DNA profile to public databases.
The profile had thousands of matches in the database, but none were close relatives.
Genetic genealogists then started building family trees with the closest matches. It was determined the deceased was of Hispanic descent, and researchers were forced to parse through some 200 years and 11 generations of historical records—written in Spanish—to eventually identify Hernandez.
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"This case is a good example of why cases of unidentified Hispanic and Indigenous people are so challenging," said DNA Doe Project team leader Rebecca Somerhalder. "Even though it seems like a lot of matches, when they are all so distant to the Doe, we have a lot of work to do with limited access to records in Central and South American countries to work with."
Investigators say Hernandez was estranged from his family some time before his death.
"I find that there is often a lot of interesting information we can get from the small matches and the patterns between them," said team leader Trish Hurturbise. "In this case we were able to locate a close relative to Mr. Hernandez by exploring matches of his matches."