In today’s post, we will veer a bit off the beaten path, so to speak, and look at a distinguished dental specialty; forensic dentistry. The official term for the use of dentistry in criminal cases and post mortem identification is forensic odontology. These professionals are rarely recognized but play a crucial role in crime and disaster investigations.

Dental X-rays, dentures, and bite marks are all used to provide clues about the victim’s identity and/or the manner of death. A person’s teeth are as unique as fingerprints and can often sustain forces such as fire, explosions, submersion in water, and natural decay without being destroyed.

Identifying One Victim
Identifying a victim through dental records is aided immensely when authorities have narrowed down a group of suspected victims to just a few people (or, ideally, just one) and can consult the dentists who had treated them. When the identity is totally unknown, a forensic dentist investigates other databases such as those maintained by the armed forces and prisons.3

“Dental identifications are so much quicker and so much less expensive than DNA.” -Dr. Mark Bernstein, dentist and forensic dental consultant¹

Identifying Hundreds of Victims
While identifying one victim of a homicide or accident can be somewhat simple, natural disasters, plane crashes, and other large-scale tragedies are exponentially more involved.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Burkes, chief forensic dental consultant for the 9/11 attacks, over 140 dentists toiled to identify the fragments of remains that were recovered from the scene of the terrorist attacks. The identification effort was an intensely painstaking and complicated operation. First, the dentists were organized into four teams. The Go Team gathered evidence from the scene, the Antemortem Team analyzed existing dental records of suspected victims, the Postmortem Team X-rayed the recovered dental evidence, and the Comparison Team compared the X-rays of the remains of unnamed corpses to the charts of missing people presumed to have been at the scene.²

“Dentistry fulfills one of its most important social, moral, and professional obligations by applying its unique knowledge and expertise to the task of identifying countless persons who are tragic victims of fires, catastrophes, disasters, and homicides.”³

Contact Dr. Bill Dorfman, DDS – Century City Aesthetic Dentistry:

310-277-5678

Location (Tap to open in Google Maps):

2080 Century Park E Ste 1601
Los Angeles, California
90067