Forensic experts continue grim task of identifying the 15 dead in Manitoba bus crash

DAUPHIN, Man.—It is a grisly job, but someone must do it.

In the wake of Thursday’s fiery bus crash that killed 15 people just outside Carberry, Man.—mostly seniors from the town of Dauphin out for an excursion to the casino—lives no longer depend on the work of the experts tasked with piecing together the identities of the deceased.

While RCMP say that all families who have lost a loved one were notified by Friday evening, the work to determine who is who among the dead is still underway, delaying final answers—including a public list of victims—for a community, and a country, still in shock.

But the high-precision examinations being conducted of broken and burned bodies and the recovered teeth, fingerprints and genetic material from the crash site on the TransCanada Highway are vital for horrified family members trying to grieve their losses.

Dauphin city councillor Randy Daley stepped out into sunlight Saturday afternoon, taking a quick break from his post at the curling rink where officials had gathered social workers and mental health professionals and even a few therapy dogs, all ready to welcome anyone who might need the support.

Almost overnight his small town of tidy, tree-lined streets had become the epicentre of a national wave of grief. Here, there is a sense that the collision had taken out a devastating proportion of town elders who, although not yet individually named, represented collective leadership. Signs with #dauphinstrong were still popping up on roadsides.

“There’s a whole lot of unknowns,” says Daley, who was elected to the local council last fall after retiring from a career as an RCMP officer, during which he got to know the aftermath of road collisions all too well. Still, this one is on a horrifying scale.

The lack of official identification has been tough on loved ones, he says: “I don’t know that I’d want to be in that position, because I’d be going ‘I know what it means, but what does it mean?’”

For the team of forensic pathologists, anthropologists, dentists and fingerprint experts, it is a deadly serious task—one that is informed by some of recent history’s worst mass-casualty events, including the 2018 bus crash in Saskatchewan that killed 16 members of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team, the 2013 train derailment that killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Que., and the fire that killed 32 residents at a seniors home in Isle Verte, Que, in 2014.

“I have two sayings about mass disasters: haste makes waste; and on the job is not the place to get on-the-job training,” said Dr. Bob Wood, a dental consultant and former chief forensic odontologist with the Ontario Coroner’s Office.

The identities of those killed in the crash have not been released and may not be announced for several days to come, Dr. John Younes, Manitoba’s chief medical examiner, said in a Friday news conference.

Visual identification of the dead is difficult because of the damage from the impact with the truck and the ensuing fire that transformed the bus carrying the 25 passengers into a charred hull. The day after the accident, a patch of scorched grass several times the length of the bus was still visible at the crash site.

“The reason we have to undertake scientific means of investigation or identification is that most, if not all of the deceased have significant facial trauma,” he said at the afternoon briefing. “So, identifying them visually is not possible.”

The identification would rely on fingerprints, dental records, surgical histories—like hip or knee replacements or medical prostheses-and DNA, Younes said.

Such a mass-casualty event is thankfully rare in Canada, but the professionals who must make sense of the tragedy have extensive training and well-developed procedures for handling the bodies.

“It’s the same thing, but just a different version of doing a single-body identification,” said Wood, who is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of dentistry.

It is common practice to divide forensic investigators into two or three teams.

One team collects and examines the medical and dental records of those who are unaccounted for after an incident. They note any history of broken bones, medical procedures, implants, dental fillings or root canals that may help to differentiate one body from another.

Meanwhile, a second team the conducts scans, x-rays and other examinations on the physical remains that have been recovered from a place of death.

Then, it is a job of trying to match the pre-death records to the recovered human remains—a task sometimes assigned to a separate “reconciliation team.”

“It’s surprising how little differences in restoration pattern and missing teeth make huge differences in the ability to discern one body from the other,” said Wood, who also worked in Thailand to identify victims of the 2004 tsunami.

Dental records were key to identifying the remains of those killed in the Lac-Megantic train derailment, which resulted in a fire fuelled by crude oil that burned for days after the crash.

The dead from the Carberry bus crash include two men and 13 women. Unlike in an airplane or a train, the victims may not have been seated in pre-assigned places. While mostly seniors—they ranged in age from 58 to 88—they hadn’t all belonged to the same club or group, and had all signed up for the trip independently.

The intensity of the post-crash fire may have incinerated any wallets, purses, jewelry, tattoos, birthmarks or other easily evident personal markers.

And while it may still be possible to identify the two men just by looking at them, pathologists can also look to physiological markers, like pelvic bones, which are wider in a woman than in a man, as well as for things like pacemakers, surgical screws or other evidence of unique past procedures.

But Wood warned that positively identifying one of the male victims cannot then be used to identify the second male by simple process of elimination.

“If you find A, it doesn’t mean the other one is necessarily B,” he said.

“Scientific identification” — meaning identification through fingerprints, dental records, medical records or DNA — “is what’s highly preferred by the forensic pathologist.”

And the more points of positive identification, the better it is to avoid an error.

In 2018, one of the Humboldt Broncos players—injured but alive—woke up in the hospital to find that he had been listed as one of the killed in the bus crash, a mix-up attributed to the use of photographs and information provided by the team to identify the victims.

Having to use DNA would drag the process out longer, said Lelia Watamaniuk, a consulting forensic anthropologist for the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service.

“It’s terrible to have to wait. But the processes themselves they are not instantaneous processes,” she said.

“The chemical process of DNA takes some time. It’s not just squirted into a vial and you walk to the other side of the room and get the printout.”

In some cases, she said, depending on the case load of the lab, it can take weeks. And the more individuals involved in the accident the more complex that process becomes. Chief medical examiner John Eunice, speaking at a media briefing, suggested analysis and comparison of the DNA in this case would likely take at least a week.

“There’s always a balance between the feelings of the family and the need to do the job properly,” Watamaniuk said. “It’s frustrating. And we fully appreciate the families’ grief and frustration. Research is going on in those fields all the time to make it faster and more reliable.

But what’s ultimately most important is that no mistakes are made.

“It’s tragic and horrible and a lot to ask, but better that it’s done properly,” Watamaniuk said.

It is exacting work that can also be emotionally taxing, though steps are taken to deal with the psychological state of the professionals too.

One of Wood’s mentors, who was sent to Guyana in the wake of the Jonestown massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 900 cult members, recalled there being a prohibition on soldiers responsible for collecting and transporting the remains from staying with one particular body, for fear of getting emotionally attached to the victims.

“The best way you can help these people,” Wood said, “is to get them identified in an expedient manner and get them returned to their loved ones.”

With files from Steve McKinley

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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