STORY: Forensic expert Richard Weems, D.M.D., is often called in to help identify victims of mass disaster through use of dental records.
WHO: Weems, a University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Dentistry professor, is a member of the Disaster Mortuary Operation Response Team, or DMORT. The team is part of the National Disaster Medical System, and it also responds to the authority of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). "DMORT is an elite group of qualified professionals whose task it is to recover, identify and process victims of mass disasters nationally and internationally," Weems said.
WHAT: "Emergency medical workers would first secure the scenes and search for and evacuate all survivors. The search process inevitably leads to the recovery of fatalities. A DMORT team is usually led by a medical examiner, who oversees the autopsies to determine the cause of death. Fingerprint experts then determine the identification of the victim, unless there isn't enough skin tissue to identify a victim in that way. That's when experts resort to using surviving teeth to compare with a victim's dental records.
"When it comes to identifying victims in a mass disaster, the name of the game is organization," Weems said. The process usually involves three dental teams: an anti-mortem group, who works on trying to secure anti-mortem (or pre-death) dental records of suspected victims; a post-mortem group, who works on making post-mortem records and x-rays from teeth found at the scene of the accident; and a comparison team, who tries to match the two sets of records. Weems said sometimes, if a filling or other man-made dental apparatus is large enough or has enough of an unusual shape, a victim can be identified with just one tooth.
CALL: Tracy Bischoff, UAB Media Relations, 205-934-8935 or [email protected]. After hours, call 205-934-3411 and ask for the Media Relations person on call.
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NOTE: We are the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Please use UAB on second reference. We are not to be confused with the University of Alabama, which is a separate, independent campus.
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