New Cold Case Advisory Team and Staffing Model

NIJ is excited to announce that NamUs is adding a new Cold Case Advisory (CCA) Team to its offerings.  The CCA Team is a multidisciplinary group of investigative professionals consisting of former law enforcement, medicolegal death investigators, DNA specialists, analysts, and forensic scientists.  

The CCA Team is designed to provide agencies with a technical assessment of their cold cases to ensure all forensic and investigative avenues have been explored. NamUs will leverage the CCA Team’s collective expertise to generate solutions for long-term missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons cases. They will work closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, the National Archives, and other federal, international, and non-government organizations to generate case leads and help resolve cases.

To accommodate the integration of the CCA Team into the suite of NamUs services, we have redesigned how users contact our staff and request support.

First, many of our current team members will transition to the CCA role to better leverage their professional expertise while supporting NamUs cases. In addition, we have begun onboarding new staff members who will serve as Regional System Administrators (RSA) to provide our professional users with the same database support required for case entry, updates, and resolutions.

A contact and support request is being added to the NamUs website to aid in this transition, allowing users to choose from various options to suit their needs. Dedicated RSA staff will monitor incoming requests, follow up with users as needed, and connect our CCA Team with the appropriate investigating agencies.

Second, we are streamlining our regional map to include three divisions: East, Central, and West regions. By reducing the complexity of our regional map, we have made it easier for users to identify their regional support options. In our previous model, professional users were assigned a single point of contact for all case support. With the changes to our regional map, each agency has overlapping support from a small, dedicated team of Regional System Administrators. This will allow us to continue to provide personalized support with the added benefit of a multidisciplinary team of experts working behind the scenes to lend a fresh perspective to your unresolved cases.

NamUs continues to offer DNA analysis with CODIS entry, forensic genetic genealogy, anthropology support, forensic odontology, fingerprint analysis, tattoo database searches, and analytical services at no cost to users. To request any of these forensic services, please Contact Us for more information. 

The NamUs program continues to be your first stop for support when working to resolve juvenile and adult long-term missing and unidentified persons cases. With the introduction of our CCA Team and redesigning our regional map, NIJ and NamUs are excited to provide additional options to generate case leads, and ultimately resolve cases.