The Monroe County Sheriff's Office announced Thursday that a victim in a homicide nearly 40 years ago has finally been identified.
According to the sheriff's office, detectives were alerted to skeletal remains in a wooded lot in Ida, MI on Oct. 17, 1986. That victim has been identified as Shaun Daniel Brauner.
During the course of their investigation in 1986, the medical examiner determined the remains to be a white male between the ages of 35 and 45, and the cause of death ruled blunt force trauma to the head. However, police were unable to identify who the remains belonged to.
In 2017, a detective sent samples of remains through funding from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to the The University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. In 2018, they were able to extract a DNA sample which was entered into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
Fast forward to the fall of 2019 and the case was re-assigned and the new detective with the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office looked into other ways to identity the victim.
In the fall of 2021, the detective was notified that a National DNA Index System alerted a possible association with a "family reference sample" that possibly belonged to a sister of the victim.
The detective met with the family member and learned her brother, Brauner, of Detroit, had been missing since June 1986. The detective later learn Brauner was the victim of a homicide in Wayne County that was adjudicated in Wayne County in the summer of 1990.
In November 2024, the detective bureau sent forensic evidence to Othram's laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas to get advanced DNA testing. Scientists produced a suitable DNA extract from the remains and it was later confirmed to be Brauner.
Police say Brauner's remains were returned to his family.
