After having been nameless for more than 40 years, it took just a few hours for the DNA Doe Project to identify James Paul Freund.
âIt was a quick solve,â said Jennifer Randolph, co-leader on the team that was able to identify the Lancaster native as the Sumter Jock Doe.
Volunteer genealogists with DDP were able to find two of Freund’s second cousins “within a matter of hours” after running DNA extracted from his teeth through public databases built by people who use DNA testing kits like 23andMe, Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.
âThat was a sign that this was probably going to be a pretty easy case to solve,â Randolph said.
Domestic violence has spiked on the Island in recent months, as the constraints of isolation and stressors of an ongoing pandemic heighten the risk of home violence and complicate support services.
Among the trends are an increase in domestic assault and battery charges and high numbers of both restraining orders and restraining order violations. The increases mirror a national trend that has seen rates of domestic violence rise across the country during the pandemic. Even more striking on the Island is that while the rates of domestic violence have gone up, calls for help to support services have mostly stayed flat, signaling that victims of abuse locked at home with their abusers in many incidences due to the pandemic face even greater barriers to seek support.