After human remains discovery, Jasper Co. officials seek expert forensic help
Jasper County officials are seeking outside assistance to help identify apparent human remains found during a brush fire over the weekend.
Coroner Jeremiah Vaigneur said on Wednesday his office was in the process of sending the remains to a forensic anthropologist and forensic dentist, most likely somewhere in South Carolina.
Police began investigating Saturday after a landowner in the sparsely populated Gilmania Road area reported finding apparent human remains during a controlled fire on their property. Early observations indicated the remains “may have been there for some time,” according to the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office.
The property is located in the Coosawatchie area in northern Jasper County, about 7 miles southwest of downtown Yemassee. Photos from WTOC 11 showed a group of deputies at the smoke-filled scene, where a small plume of flame was still visible along a dirt road in the nearby woods.
After returning to the scene Sunday and recovering “additional material” for testing, deputies had finished their on-scene investigation — but the case was ongoing as of Wednesday, according to JCSO spokesperson Christian Felt.
Vaigneur said there’s no telling when this “unusual case” could yield answers.
“We would love to be able to close the case out with the very first set of dental comparisons, but there is no way to tell how many we have to go through,” he said. “We’re going to solve it by process of elimination.”
It was unclear if the remains belonged to a male or female, the coroner told Bluffton Today.
Vaigneur declined to comment further on the state of the remains, citing his duty to potential living relatives of the deceased. A positive identification could possibly mark the conclusion to an unsolved missing person case, he previously said.
“We’ve got a lot of people out there, a lot of family members — not hoping that this is their loved one, but to be the family that can put closure to something,” he told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. “So we certainly want to try to get that information to them, but do it as privately as possible until it’s time to release that information.”
