After lengthy investigation, DNA identifies man found dead in Rosemount in 2014
Updated: 1:50 p.m.
He’d been dead for as much as a year, after apparently living in an abandoned Union Pacific railroad shed and using newspapers to line his shoes.
He was dressed in a leather jacket and ill-fitting jeans.
And for years, after his remains were found in September 2014, nobody knew the identity of the man found dead in that shed along the tracks in Rosemount, a chunk of rebar wedged into the inside door handle to keep it closed.
Now, thanks to a DNA match, he finally has a name: James Everett, age 48, from Cohocton, New York.
Create a More Connected Minnesota
MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.
Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker said a lack of evidence — and the length of time between when Everett died and when his remains were found — stymied investigators for nearly a decade.
“Our John Doe consisted of skeletonized remains, he was dressed warmly in multiple layers. We could tell from the autopsy that he had long brown and gray hair, we could also discern that he had an earring in his left ear. And that was about as much as we could say,” Baker said.
Previous clues had been a dead end. He left no identification. An FBI reconstruction of his face brought in tips that were systematically ruled out. Investigators even looked for patterns in electronic benefit card transactions among stores nearby. Initial DNA profiles hit dead ends.
A community funeral service and burial was held in Inver Grove Heights in 2017 — what county officials said was "only the second time in the modern history of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office that unidentified human remains were buried."
But ongoing efforts to find a genetic match finally paid off earlier this year, when the DNA Doe project matched mitochondrial DNA and investigators finally tracked down Everett’s family.
His family said in a statement that he was supposed to have left on a work trip in 2013. He turned up briefly in Montana and his vehicle was found abandoned in Scott County in the Twin Cities suburbs that fall.
“We don’t know a lot,” said Mike Dahlstrom, Rosemount police chief. Rosemount police were called to investigate when a railroad electrician happened on Everett’s remains in a switching shed the railroad was about to demolish.
His family said he’d been a cook in the Rochester, N.Y., area, and that a missing person case had been closed after a Montana trooper talked to him shortly after he initially was reported missing. It wasn’t clear how long he’d been living in the trackside shed or what drew him to Minnesota.
And it remains unclear how he died.
“I'm quite confident there's no reason to believe his death was criminal in nature, given that there was no trauma to his skeleton; there was certainly nothing to suggest that anyone had harmed him. But you know, whether his death was an accident or due to environmental exposure or intoxication or whether his death was natural, I'm afraid we'll just never know the answer to that,” Baker said.
In a statement provided by Hennepin County, Everett's widow, Patricia Everett, said he was a "computer geek," a cook, a self-taught guitar player and a sports fan.
“We, especially me, never gave up searching," she said in the statement. " We were always on the lookout for him when out and about and frequently did a lot of online searching for any indication of activity or other clues as to his whereabouts. ... Although this has not been the expected nor desired outcome in our search for him, we are all grateful and blessed to at least have this opportunity for closure, which many are not as fortunate to get.”