GALVESTON — A detective will scour the West End shoreline this week for clues to help him identify the origin of a 3-inch piece of human jawbone found in the surf Saturday.
“We’ll be looking into it,” said Lt. Jorge Treviño, Galveston Police Department spokesman.
The bone came from the lower right jaw of a person between 10 and 20 years old, but investigators know little else about the weathered piece of jawbone and two teeth, said John Florence, Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office spokesman. He said investigators have not linked the bone to any of the county’s cold-case murders.
One of the college students who discovered the bone along the shoreline Saturday said he hopes police are able to identify the person.
“If this child was a drowning victim, or anything worse than that, maybe their family could have some sort of closure,” said Mitchell Blanchard, a junior at Sam Houston State University. “They could possibly have something to bury, you know? People have buried less.”
Blanchard and his friends from the University of Houston discovered the bone while they were combing the beach for seashells about 400 yards away from their rented house on Terramar Beach. At first, his friend dismissed it as a piece of driftwood, but then they noticed the teeth.
“I looked at it for a second and thought this might be something bigger than we’re actually thinking,” Blanchard said.
The jawbone had two small ivory-colored teeth and what appeared to be a blackened molar that had not yet protruded through the bone, he said.
“When we picked it up, there was a teeny-tiny hermit crab on top of the third molar, just crawling around,” he said.
They rinsed the bone in the surf, folded it into a piece of plastic they found floating in the water and “sprinted back to the beach house,” where they placed it in a plastic baggie for safekeeping, Blanchard said.
He said he didn’t initially call police because he didn’t want to interrupt his girlfriend’s 21st birthday party that night by alerting the police about a bone his father assured him over the phone was from a dog.
When he returned home to Friendswood on Sunday, he showed the bone to his father, an employee of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.
The father immediately took it a dental hygienist, who confirmed it was human, and they called Friendswood police.
Blanchard said he and his friends had discovered another piece of bone, one that looked like a pork rib, before they found the jaw bone, but they dismissed it.
“I have no idea what a human rib bone would look like,” he said. “It looked like a pork rib and that might be what it was, but the coloration of the bone, compared to the coloration of the jaw bone, was very, very similar.”
The jaw bone will be examined by a forensic dentist this week who can more accurately determine the age, Florence said.
A piece of the bone will be sent to the University of North Texas for DNA testing, which could take months, he said.
