Photo: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Sixty-five years after a boy was found dead and abandoned in Philadelphia, authorities have identified the young victim.
The child, known as “the Boy in the Box,” has been identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw announced during a Dec. 8 press conference.
Born on Jan. 13, 1953, the boy was just 4 years old when his body was discovered naked and beaten in a cardboard box on the side of a road in the city’s Fox Chase neighborhood on Feb. 25, 1957, police said.
After following hundreds of leads that led nowhere, it took a breakthrough in new and advanced DNA testing, known as genetic genealogical technology, to establish the child’s identity, investigators said.
“He was one of these throwaway, forgotten children,” Bill Fleisher of theVidocq Societytold the outlet, and called this case “the longest continuously investigated homicide in the history of the Philadelphia Police Department.”
The news follows an announcement last year that investigators were getting close to solving the case.
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“There have been rapid developments as it pertains to that investigation,” Philadelphia Police Captain Jason Smith toldNBC Philadelphia. Since then, the lost boy’s DNA has been traced to a “prominent family” in Delaware County, Pa., the outlet reported.
Zarelli’s birth parents, who police confirmed are deceased, were not named.
“Joseph has a number of siblings on both the mother’s and father’s side who are living, and it is out of respect for them that their parents' information remain confidential,” Smith told the press Thursday.
Finally, the boy’s headstone in Philadelphia’s Ivy Hill Cemetery has a name.
source: people.com
