Eric Benbow partners with Detroit to help investigate death scenes
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EmailDepartment of Entomology's Eric Benbow is using a more than $866,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant to help Detroit death-scene investigators examine the changing populations of bug and bacteria types and numbers of decomposing bodies.
Department of Entomology’s Eric Benbow is using a more than $866,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant to help Detroit death-scene investigators examine the changing populations of bug and bacteria types and numbers of decomposing bodies. Deciphering the clues they provide could mean the difference between a closed case and an unsolved murder.
“We know how important the human microbiome, the bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms that live in your body, is to human health,” Benbow said. “We, and other researchers, hypothesize that these communities play an equally important role in postmortem. We are the first university to work directly with medical examiners in this capacity, pioneering the collection of novel human microbiome information at the scene of death or during autopsy.”
Through the grant, which is being shared with Mississippi State University, MSU will work directly with the Wayne County Medical Examiners Office. When examiners are contacted to investigate a death scene, they will gather samples and use swab kits provided by MSU. The kits are then sent to MSU to be processed and then sequenced in a campus genomics lab.
Benbow’s efforts are already seeing positive results. His lab was recently contacted to investigate a case unrelated to the Detroit partnership. His team gathered samples from the scene, in which the cause and time of death, as well as the suspect, were already known. Knowing those key facts will allow Benbow to validate the data reflected by the bugs and bacteria found on and in the body.
