Toronto police say ancestry tests link this unidentified man to Manitoulin Island and Blind River areas.
CBC
It’s a mystery connected to Manitoulin Island and the north shore of Lake Huron that police thought they had solved five times, but each time they were thwarted.
Toronto police are looking to identify a man whose body was pulled from the Don River by a bike path near Queen St. E, on July 26, 2002.
Foul play is not suspected in this case
A special homicide and missing persons unit has been given provincial funding to use investigative genetic genealogy to identify 31 people, and this man is one of them.
Project 31 began in 2022 as a humanitarian effort to wrap up long-term unidentified cases where DNA was readily available.
Detective constable James Atkinson said while at least half a dozen other cold cases have been solved quickly through DNA tests, this one is proving very frustrating.
He said the man’s DNA was uploaded to GEDmatch, which Atkinson described as a hobby site that now functions like a library.
It turns out that the mystery man has strong ties to First Nations north of Toronto.
“About roughly half of his matches are coming from Mississauga and Blind River and the other half are coming from Manitoulin,” he said. “And the matches are spread out because those families have spread out from Wiikwemkoong right across the island through the other reserves.”
The message, said Atkinson, is that the man had one parent from the north shore and one from Manitoulin, but finding close relatives is proving difficult.
At one point, he said he thought he had found the man’s sister on Manitoulin, but when her DNA test came back six weeks later, their hopes were dashed.
“We can't trust our matches because people are related to each other more than once,” he said. “So we can't tell if our best match looks like a second cousin but it's beginning to look like she's related to him twice or she is related to both of his parents.”
Atkinson said the man’s last name may be Pine, Corbiere, Toulouse, Migwans, Debassige, Roy, Vincent, Jimagan, Waboose, Picody or Sissenah, or none of those.
What further clouds the picture is that the man’s age falls within the 60s scoop generation, so there is a chance that nobody in the Blind River area or Manitoulin area knows about him.
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It’s a mystery connected to Manitoulin Island and the north shore of Lake Huron that police thought they had solved five times, but each time they were thwarted.