Remains Discovered In Texas In 2013 Identified As Teen Missing Since 2000

Investigators used skilled family tree companies to match Sylvia Nicole Smith’s stays with the DNA of her grieving mom.

Joe Raedle through Getty Photos

The mom of a lacking Black teen acquired heartbreaking information this month, greater than 20 years after her youngster’s disappearance.

Sylvia Nicole Smith’s mom first reported her lacking on Feb. 18, 2000. The 16-year-old had final been seen 4 days earlier, prompting her mom to file a runaway report with the Midland Police Division in West Texas.

On Monday, the Texas Division of Public Security, or DPS, introduced that Sylvia’s stays had lastly been recognized.

“The Rangers are actually conducting a murder investigation into her dying and [ask] anybody with info into her disappearance or murder to return ahead with info,” the company said.

In 2013, employees surveying an oil nicely website in Midland County found human stays there, which have been transported to the Heart for Human Identification on the College of North Texas and deemed more likely to belong to a murder sufferer.

After the invention, the Texas Rangers, DPS plane and the Midland County Sheriff’s Workplace performed an intensive search of the realm. Whereas an anthropology report revealed that the sufferer was a feminine between ages 14 and 21, an current database of genetic info turned up no outcomes that will assist determine her.

In 2020, the Texas Rangers and the Midland County District Lawyer’s Workplace despatched the still-unidentified sufferer’s stays to DNA Labs Worldwide and Parabon NanoLabs. That’s when superior DNA evaluation decided her eye and hair coloration and pores and skin tone, confirming she was African American.

Finally, these particulars allowed investigators to resume their efforts at figuring out the sufferer by talking with locals — and so they ultimately discovered a DNA match.

“Rangers have interviewed quite a few potential relations to collect household info, and in Could 2022, info led to the sufferer’s mom within the Midland space,” the DPS defined. “In talking with the mom, she said considered one of her daughters — Sylvia Nicole Smith — had been lacking since 2000.”

Sylvia’s mom supplied samples of her DNA to ensure that the College of North Texas, which formally decided that the murder sufferer was her daughter.

Whereas that tragic matter is now settled, the DPS said firmly that its homicide investigation has solely simply begun.