New technology detectives are using to help solve cold cases

In the winter of 2016

A young man's body was found behind a building in

Brooklyn with a T shirt on and a backpack filled

with kids stuff a novel a notebook some art supplies

and we have no leads on his name

We don't know who he is

We don't know very much about him but I know

he was reading that comic

I mean it's haunting

I think about him all the time

It's cold cases like this one motivating the all women

team in the new york city medical examiner's office Aden

naka yvonne Hudson Dr Angela Solar going back to the

1990s were currently managing about 1300 cases of unidentified individuals

The vast majority of cases these women investigate involved people

whose identities are known but when they have time they

turn to the mysteries you start to Wonder Like do

they have a family member out there I wonder if

they had kids Is there someone looking for them You

can't help to think about that stuff

It becomes deeply personal doesn't it It does

And we we all have unidentified individuals that we just

constantly think about in the last two years

They have solved 20 cold cases

New technology

Together with good old fashioned detective instincts Can paint a

remarkably vivid picture

A woman found in Brooklyn in 2011 tells a whole

story just with her teeth including this denture and this

is quite typical in Central American and Mexican communities

Isotopes in the teeth

She still has revealed even more everything that you ingest

the water you drink the food you eat gets incorporated

into your living tissue Bonus living tissue

So you literally are what you eat as a child

She frequently traveled from the coast to the mountains and

some regions where that might be occurring are actually in

central America

We're seeing the signatures overlap over Honduras

The team also reconstructs faces when all they have is

a skull

A three D printer creates the model

Art students apply the clay

Nothing replaces seeing that person's face

And so this is really it's been a really useful

tool and how accurate is it It's variable

Um so it's it's based on science in terms of

the depth of tissue the shape of your features the

features of your face

But there's a lot of artistic license involved

Always in the back of their minds they say is

the anguish families are feeling

There's nobody to go home to

Their

Aaliyah boomer was 27 when she went missing in 2015

Her mother says she loved to write and was outgoing

The family has no idea what happened

It's painful

It's very painful not knowing where your child is at

and she's the baby

The medical examiner's urge families to search the government database

name us which is also used by law enforcement and

to consider as painful as it may be that medical

examiners can help a cold case that may be years

and years old

Why Why does it matter so much for me

It's just heartbreaking to know that somebody is still unidentified

um because somebody loved them Somebody cared for them

Um and we should too

It really matters to me that that person gets their

name back and goes back to their home and their

family Stephanie got NBC News new york