Infant’s autopsy leaves unanswered questions, police say

The Columbia Police Department is continuing to investigate after an infant’s body was found at a north Columbia business on Thursday.

An autopsy conducted Friday morning didn’t reveal the baby’s gender or race.

“If it were an adult it would be easy to identify the sex and even the age,” said Richard Sherwood, a professor in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences at the University of Missouri.

Sherwood said identifying an infant is much more challenging than identifying an adult.

“Babies just don’t have a lot of individuality at that point so even doing facial reconstruction would be very difficult,” he said.

Investigators will likely have to rely on DNA extraction to help identify the baby, Sherwood said.

“If you can extract DNA, and you have an individual that you suspect is the parent, you’ll be able to identify it readily,” he said.

Sherwood said DNA can reveal the gender fairly quickly but any more identification information can take longer.

Police spent hours at the crime scene outside McKnight Tire on North Providence Road for several hours Friday and later revealed that an employee found the body of a child less than 1 year old in a tree line outside the business.

Assistant Chief Jeremiah Hunter pleaded with the public to provide information after the grotesque discovery Thursday and reiterated that message Friday in an interview.