Georgia · East Point, Fulton County · Crime & Courts

Human Skull Found in East Point, GA: Three Accounts That Do Not Match

A human skull was found in a wooded area in East Point, and three newsrooms describe it three different ways. Two put the discovery on a Thursday evening. One puts it on Tuesday morning. Two report that cadaver dogs found nothing more. One reports they uncovered additional evidence. The remains are unidentified. This page publishes every version attributed and resolves none of them.

What was found, in each newsroom's own words

A human skull, in the woods, in a residential part of East Point. That much all three accounts agree on, and it is worth saying plainly before the disagreements start, because the disagreements are large enough to swallow the story if they are not fenced off first.

Atlanta News First reports the call and the recovery. Its account: East Point police officers “were called to the area of the 4000 block of Janice Drive to investigate a report of what appeared to be a human skull, which someone found in the tree line behind that area.” The station reports that “Detectives and the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office recovered the skull and are working to identify the remains.”

WSB-TV reports who found it and how. The station reports that a man who did not want to share his name publicly said he found the skull in the woods next to his backyard, and that his dogs alerted him to it.

FOX 5 Atlanta reports the search operation. Its account opens: “Authorities in East Point are investigating after search teams discovered a human skull in the area on Tuesday morning,” and describes a large-scale response from search and rescue personnel.

One skull. Nothing in the record compiled for this page describes any other human remains being recovered — and one of the three accounts says something different about that, which is the subject of a section of its own below.

The first conflict: when the skull was found

Two owners put the discovery on a Thursday evening. One puts it on Tuesday morning. These are not two ways of saying the same thing, and this page does not average them.

Atlanta News First, published Tuesday, Aug. 11 at 9:18 p.m. ET. Its first line reports that police said a human skull was found in an East Point neighbourhood “last week,” and its second begins “On Thursday evening” before describing officers being called to Janice Drive. The station does not print a calendar date for the Thursday.

WSB-TV, published Tuesday, Aug. 11 at 11:26 p.m. ET. It supplies the date the other account leaves out: “East Point Police Department said someone called to report the discovery Thursday evening, Aug. 6.” Aug. 6, 2026 was a Thursday, which is internally consistent with Atlanta News First.

FOX 5 Atlanta, published Tuesday, Aug. 11 at 4:57 p.m. ET. Its account puts the discovery itself on Tuesday: authorities are investigating “after search teams discovered a human skull in the area on Tuesday morning.”

What that means for a reader. In two accounts, Tuesday is the day police came back with dogs to look for more. In the third, Tuesday is the day the skull turned up. The Local Alert has not obtained a police report, a call log or an agency statement that would settle it, and refuses to pick the version that reads better. Both are on this page, attributed, in every place they appear.

The second conflict: what the cadaver dogs did or did not turn up

This is the disagreement with the most riding on it, because it is the difference between a search that came up empty and a search that produced something.

Atlanta News First. “On Tuesday, police officers and the medical examiner's office returned to the site with members of the Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue team. They used cadaver dogs to search for any additional skeletal remains, but didn't find any, police said.” Note the attribution inside that sentence: the station is reporting what police said.

WSB-TV. “Tuesday night, police confirmed they did not find any additional bones.” Again attributed to police, and again negative.

FOX 5 Atlanta. “The Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue team arrived around 9 a.m. with cadaver dogs, which hit on a specific area and uncovered additional evidence to assist crime scene investigators and the medical examiner.” That is positive, and it is sourced differently: FOX 5's own note at the foot of its story says the information “was gathered from Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue team member Angel Alonso, who explained how search crews assisted local law enforcement, as well as news staff who spoke with officials at the scene.”

A possible reconciliation exists, and this page will not perform it. “Additional bones” and “additional evidence” are not the same phrase, and a reader can see for themselves that one could be true without the other being false. But no source in the record compiled for this page draws that distinction, and a news page that quietly stitches two accounts into a smoother third account has invented something. The two negative statements and the one positive statement are printed side by side, and the reader gets to hold both.

Where this happened, as precisely as the record allows

The block, not the address. Atlanta News First names the 4000 block of Janice Drive and describes the tree line behind that area. That is the most specific location any of the three accounts gives, and it is where this page stops. No house number appears here, and no photograph, map or coordinate does either.

The wider area, per WSB-TV. That station does not name a street. It reports that the woods sit next to a man's backyard, “in a subdivision near Interstate 285 and Camp Creek Parkway.” Anyone who knows south Fulton knows that describes a large area with a great many houses in it.

FOX 5 Atlanta names neither. Its account places the search in East Point and describes a wooded area, without a street or a subdivision.

Why the restraint is not squeamishness. There is a person living at the property behind that tree line, who called police about something he found in the woods and then declined to give his name to a television station. Publishing his exact address would hand a permanent, searchable result to every person who ever wonders about the house where the skull was found. The block is enough for a reader to understand where this is. The number is not this page's to circulate.

The man who found it, and the neighbours who live there

WSB-TV is the only account in the record compiled for this page that describes the finder. The station reports that a man who did not want to share his name publicly told Channel 2's Courtney Francisco that he found the skull in the woods next to his backyard, and that his dogs alerted him to it.

He is not named here. He declined to be named by the newsroom that spoke to him, and there is no version of the public interest that is served by a Georgia news site overriding that decision from a distance.

One neighbour is quoted by name. WSB-TV quotes Mea Lamar saying: “That's shocking. It's a quiet neighborhood.” The same neighbour is quoted on what an identification would mean: “Hopefully that family will be at least knowing that person has been identified.”

That second quote is the whole case for restraint on this page. Somewhere there may be a family that does not yet know. Speculation about who the person was, how they died, or what the graves in the back have to do with anything reaches that family first and hardest, and it reaches them as noise rather than news.

Angel Alonso, and exactly what he said

Angel Alonso is a volunteer searcher, and the two newsrooms that mention him describe his role differently. WSB-TV reports that “Angel Alonso runs the nonprofit group of volunteers trained to search for missing people and recover evidence.” FOX 5 Atlanta, in its sourcing note, calls him a “Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue team member.”

What he told WSB-TV about the call. “We got a call from East Point to assist them,” Alonso said. “They wanted us to come out and bring our cadaver dogs out and search the area and see if we can find any more evidence of a body.”

What he told WSB-TV about the graves. “We did find some unmarked graves back in the back,” Alonso said. “Like a private-type cemetery.”

Why his title matters more than it looks. A quote from a volunteer searcher and a quote from a homicide detective read almost identically on a page, and they are not the same thing at all. One is a description offered by a person who was standing in the woods. The other is a finding by the agency that will have to defend it in a courtroom. Every time Alonso appears on this page, he is named and his role is stated, so that no sentence here can be mistaken for an official account.

The unmarked graves are a description, not a finding

This is the single most repeatable and most damaging detail in the story, and it is the one with the least behind it. Read the sourcing again: one volunteer, speaking to one newsroom, describing what he saw as being “like” a private-type cemetery.

WSB-TV reports what police did with it. “He said police took photos. Detectives did not confirm a connection between the graves and the skull Tuesday night.” Photographing something is documentation. It is not confirmation, and it is not a conclusion about what the something is.

Neither of the other two accounts mentions graves at all. Atlanta News First's account is about the call, the recovery and the follow-up search. FOX 5 Atlanta's is about the search operation and the resources the volunteer team brings.

What this page therefore will not write. It will not write that a burial ground was discovered. It will not write that graves were found near the skull, because “near” is a claim about distance that no source makes. It will not write that police are investigating a cemetery. And it will not write any sentence that lets a reader walk away believing investigators have linked the two, because the only newsroom that reported the graves also reported, in the same breath, that detectives had not.

Unmarked burials are not rare in Georgia, and that is context rather than explanation. The General Assembly wrote an entire chapter of the code around the fact that they exist, are frequently forgotten and are frequently built over. That does not tell anyone what is in the back of these particular woods. Nobody in the record compiled for this page has said.

Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue is a volunteer nonprofit

It is not a Georgia state agency, despite the name. FOX 5 Atlanta describes it as a non-profit organisation and reports that the team “consists of nearly 150 volunteers across the state, including former first responders, military veterans, paramedics, and law enforcement officers.”

What FOX 5 Atlanta reports it brings. The station reports the organisation “provides free search assistance using cadaver dogs, drones, sonar, and all-terrain vehicles to help families and law enforcement locate missing people,” and that families can request free assistance through the team's website or by calling the number the station published.

What a volunteer team cannot do. It cannot take custody of remains, order an autopsy, determine a cause of death, make an arrest or speak for a police department. When a volunteer describes what a dog did, that is a description of a search, not a forensic result. The distinction is not a slight on the volunteers, several of whom FOX 5 Atlanta reports are former first responders and law enforcement officers. It is a description of who is accountable for what.

Why this site draws the line so hard. A reader skimming a story that mixes “police,” “the medical examiner” and “the search and rescue team” into an undifferentiated “authorities” comes away believing the government has said things it has not said. On this page the three are never collapsed into one word.

Where our sources differ

Three published accounts from three separate owners sit behind this page. Nothing below is averaged, merged or resolved. Where an account does not carry a point, the table says so rather than implying agreement.

How independent these three accounts actually are

Three owners, which is unusually good for a story this size. Atlanta News First is a Gray Media station in Atlanta. WSB-TV is a Cox Media Group station. FOX 5 Atlanta is a FOX Television Stations property. This site counts a broadcast group once by owner rather than by call letters, so three stations here really are three newsrooms.

Independent does not mean unrelated. All three appear to have been at or around the same wooded lot on the same Tuesday, and two of the three attribute their central factual claims to the same East Point Police Department. Shared source, separate newsroom. That is why agreement between them is meaningful but not conclusive, and why disagreement between them is worth an entire section rather than a footnote.

What The Local Alert did not obtain. No incident report, no medical examiner record, no agency statement, no call log and no interview. Nobody from this site stood in those woods. Every factual claim on this page is traceable to one of the three named stories or to a government or statutory source cited by name in the sections below.

One further note on counting. Other newsrooms may well have covered this. This page makes no claim about what any outlet outside the three named here did or did not publish, because it did not open them, and a claim about the wider press is a claim like any other.

What this page will not say about the remains

It will not describe the person. No age, no sex, no ancestry, no height, no time since death. None of it appears in the record compiled for this page, and inventing a plausible profile for an unidentified decedent is exactly the kind of guess that ends up quoted back as fact.

It will not describe a cause or a manner of death. FOX 5 Atlanta reports that authorities have not confirmed a cause of death. A skull found in a tree line is not evidence of a homicide, an accident, a natural death or anything else until a medical examiner says so, and the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office has not said so anywhere in the record compiled for this page.

It will not describe the condition of the remains, beyond the phrase all three newsrooms use: a human skull. There is no reporting purpose served by more, and there is an obvious cost if the person is eventually identified and a family reads this page.

It will not connect this to any missing person case. FOX 5 Atlanta's story text says it remains unclear whether the remains are connected to any open missing persons cases in the region. That is the state of the record, and speculation about named missing people is how living people get hurt by a news page.

And it will not promise to update. This page is a record of what three named newsrooms had published as of the time stamped on it. Nothing revisits it.

What a Georgia medical examiner does with unidentified remains

This section is general background on Georgia procedure. It is not a description of any step taken in this case.

The duty to report comes first. Georgia law, at O.C.G.A. § 45-16-24, requires any law enforcement officer or other person having knowledge of certain deaths to notify the coroner or county medical examiner immediately. The list of triggering circumstances includes a death occurring as a result of violence, a death occurring suddenly when in apparent good health, a death occurring in any suspicious or unusual manner, and a death unattended by a physician. Human remains found in woods behind a house engage more than one of those categories at once.

Fulton County has a medical examiner, not just a coroner. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office describes its work on the county government's website as determining “the cause and manner of death and to clarify the circumstances surrounding death,” and says it investigates deaths that occur in the county or where a body is discovered there. The county lists the office at 430 Pryor Street, S.W., Atlanta, GA 30312, with a main number of 404-613-4400.

Cause and manner are two different findings. Cause of death is the medical mechanism. Manner of death is the classification: natural, accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. A medical examiner can determine one without the other, and “undetermined” is a real and permanent answer in a meaningful number of cases, particularly skeletal ones.

And identity is a third question entirely. An office can hold remains for a long time with no cause, no manner and no name, which is precisely the situation the two accounts describing the medical examiner's work put this case in.

How identification actually works

Also general background, not a description of this case.

Identification is comparison, not recognition. Almost nobody is identified because someone looked at remains and knew who it was. Identification happens when something measurable about the remains matches something measurable that already exists on paper, on film or in a database.

The usual routes, and which ones a skull closes off. Fingerprints need fingers. Visual identification needs a face and someone who can bear to look at it. What remains for skeletal cases is forensic anthropology, which estimates a biological profile from bone; forensic odontology, which compares teeth and dental work against dental records; and DNA, compared either against a relative's reference sample or against a database.

Every one of those needs a candidate. Dental comparison requires knowing whose dental records to pull. A family reference DNA sample requires knowing which family to ask. This is the part that surprises people: the science does not produce a name. It confirms or excludes a name that someone else has already suggested. That is why unidentified cases can sit for years while the laboratory work itself would take weeks.

Georgia has state laboratory capacity for the analysis side. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Division of Forensic Sciences describes itself as furnishing scientific support to the criminal justice system of Georgia and says it was established in 1952 as the second statewide crime laboratory in the United States. Its scientists analyse physical evidence for officers, investigators and district attorneys across the state. Nothing in the record compiled for this page places the GBI in this case; the laboratory is mentioned here because a reader asking “who would even do that testing in Georgia” deserves an answer.

How long identification takes, and why nobody can promise a date

The honest answer is a range measured in days to decades. Anyone offering tighter than that is guessing.

Fast cases have a name attached early. Remains are found, a missing person report from the same area matches the general profile, dental records exist and are legible, and a comparison closes the case in short order.

Slow cases have nobody to compare against. No local missing person fits. No family has reported anyone missing, sometimes because the person had no one to report them. In those cases the remains wait for the candidate rather than the other way round.

Skeletal DNA is genuinely harder. Extracting usable DNA from bone is more difficult and slower than from soft tissue, degradation matters, and results are not always usable at all. Laboratory backlogs are real and are not a scandal peculiar to any one office.

And confirmation comes before announcement. Offices generally do not release a name until an identification is confirmed and next of kin have been notified, which means the gap between “identified” and “publicly identified” is real, and a silent week does not necessarily mean a stalled case. The Local Alert does not know where this case sits and does not guess.

NamUs, and why a family should care about it

NamUs is the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, which describes itself as “a national centralized repository and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases across the United States.” It covers three case types: missing persons, unidentified persons and unclaimed persons.

It is free, and families can use it directly. NamUs says it “provides free forensic services, to include forensic odontology, fingerprint examination, forensic anthropology, and DNA analyses,” and that “Family DNA collection kits are also provided at no cost.”

Why that matters for a case like an unidentified skull. An unidentified remains case can only be matched against missing person cases that exist somewhere searchable. A family that files a missing person report with a local agency has done the essential thing; asking that agency to enter the case in NamUs, and entering it themselves as a family, widens the set of cases it can ever be compared against.

This is a general recommendation, not a suggestion about this case. Nobody in the record compiled for this page has connected these remains to any missing person, and this section would be here whether or not a skull had been found in East Point.

Which agency does what in East Point

East Point Police Department. A city police department serving East Point, a city of its own inside Fulton County. It is the agency that took the report and, in two of the three accounts, the agency whose statements those accounts attribute the search results to. The City of East Point lists the department at 2727 East Point Street, East Point, GA 30344.

Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office. A county office, not a police agency, responsible for the remains and for cause and manner of death. It has no arrest power and does not charge anyone with anything.

Fulton County Police Department. A separate county police agency, which appears nowhere in the record compiled for this page. It is named here only because “Fulton County” and “police” in one sentence is the easiest way in the world for a reader to conclude the wrong agency is running this.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A state agency that assists local agencies on request and runs the state crime laboratory. Nothing in the record compiled for this page places it in this case.

Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue. A volunteer nonprofit. Not an agency, not a department, not a division of anything governmental, and never referred to on this page as “authorities.”

What Georgia law says about disturbed and unmarked burials

This section is general background on Georgia law. Nothing here is a statement that any burial was disturbed in East Point, and no source in the record compiled for this page says one was.

Georgia treats human remains as heritage, not property. O.C.G.A. § 36-72-1, the opening section of the Abandoned Cemeteries and Burial Grounds Act, states that “The care accorded the remains of deceased persons reflects respect and regard for human dignity as well as cultural, spiritual, and religious values,” and declares the General Assembly's intent that the chapter “be construed to require respectful treatment of human remains in accord with the equal and innate dignity of every human being.”

There is a duty to call police. O.C.G.A. § 31-21-6 provides that any person who knows or has reason to believe that interred human remains have been or are being disturbed, destroyed, defaced, mutilated, removed or exposed must immediately notify local law enforcement. That obligation sits on anyone, not just a landowner or a contractor.

And there is a permit regime. The same section frames the exceptions around a permit issued under O.C.G.A. § 36-72-4, a permit or contract under O.C.G.A. § 12-3-52, or written landowner permission for an archaeological excavation. In plain terms, moving or excavating interred human remains in Georgia is a permitted activity with a legal process attached, not something anyone gets to do because the land is theirs.

Why this is in the article at all. One volunteer described unmarked graves to one newsroom. That description is not a legal finding, and it is not evidence of anything having been disturbed. The law is here so a reader understands the framework a phrase like “unmarked graves” sits inside, rather than filling that space with guesswork.

How to get records in Fulton County and East Point

The police report goes through East Point. The City of East Point lists a Records and Identification Section for police incident and accident reports at (404) 902-2609, open Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, with a non-emergency departmental number of (404) 761-2170.

What the Open Records Act actually requires. Under O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71, agencies must produce for inspection all records responsive to a request within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days of receipt of a request, and where responsive records will take longer, the agency must provide the requester with a description of such records and a timeline for when the records will be available. Copying charges are capped at ten cents per page for letter or legal size documents. Where an agency withholds, subsection (d) requires it to notify the requester of the specific legal authority for the exemption by Code section, subsection and paragraph, within that same three business day frame.

Expect the initial report and expect a fight over the rest. O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72(a)(4) exempts records of law enforcement in a pending investigation — but it carves out “initial police arrest reports and initial incident reports,” which means the initial incident report is not shielded by the pendency of the investigation. Investigative files, photographs and notes are a different and much harder request while a case is open.

Medical examiner records go to the county, not the city. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office is listed by the county at 430 Pryor Street, S.W., Atlanta, GA 30312, telephone 404-613-4400, with an information request email address published on its page and forms for requesting autopsy and external examination reports. An unidentified decedent case has no next of kin to release records to, which is its own practical obstacle.

Resources for families in Georgia

If someone you love is missing, the report is the thing that matters. File it with the law enforcement agency where the person went missing. There is no waiting period in practice for taking a missing adult report, and the notion that you must wait a set number of hours is folklore rather than law.

Ask for the case to be entered into NamUs, and enter it yourself as a family. A case that exists only in one agency's files can only be matched by that agency.

Ask about a family reference DNA sample. NamUs states that family DNA collection kits are provided at no cost. A reference sample on file is the difference between an eventual match and an eventual maybe.

If a death is ruled a homicide, Georgia has a compensation programme. The Georgia Crime Victims Compensation Program, administered by the state Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, pays up to $25,000 per victim per victimisation, with category caps that include $15,000 for medical expenses, $10,000 for lost wages, $6,000 for funeral expenses, $3,000 for counselling and $1,500 for crime scene sanitisation. The programme generally requires that the crime was reported to the proper authorities within 72 hours, with exceptions for good cause, and for crimes on or after July 1, 2014, an application within three years of the crime or the death of the victim.

None of that is a statement about this case. There is no identified victim here, no determined manner of death and no criminal case in the record compiled for this page.

What we don't know yet

Everything below is absent from the record compiled for this page — the three named stories and the government sources cited above. This is not a claim about what any newsroom or agency has or has not released.

• Who the person was. No name, and no age, sex or ancestry
• Which day the skull was actually found, given that two owners say Thursday evening and one says Tuesday morning
• Whether the cadaver dogs turned anything up, given that two owners report nothing further was found and one reports additional evidence was uncovered
• What “additional evidence” would mean in FOX 5 Atlanta's account, which does not describe it
• How long the remains had been there. FOX 5 Atlanta states this remains unclear
• Cause of death and manner of death. Neither has been released
• Whether this is a criminal case at all. No source describes a homicide investigation, a suspect, an arrest or a charge
• What the unmarked graves are, who is buried in them, how old they are, or whether they have anything whatever to do with the skull. WSB-TV reports detectives did not confirm a connection
• Whether any open missing person case is connected. FOX 5 Atlanta's story text says that is unclear
• Whether the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office has since made any determination, since the three accounts were all published on Aug. 11

This page is a record of what three named newsrooms had published as of the time stamped on it. It is not updated as the investigation proceeds, and it makes no promise to revisit any of the questions above.

If you have a missing family member

• Call the police agency where the person went missing, not this site. The Local Alert is not a law enforcement agency, has no case information and cannot take a tip
• Ask specifically whether the case is in NamUs, and ask for the case number. “It's in our system” and “it's in the national system” are two different sentences
• Ask about a family reference DNA sample and about dental records. Both are only useful if they exist before a comparison is needed
• Be careful what you conclude from a news story. A skull found in a county where your relative went missing is not information about your relative, and one volunteer's description of graves is not information about anyone at all
• Do not go to the site. It is behind someone's house

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Frequently asked questions

What was found in East Point, Georgia?
A human skull. Atlanta News First reports that East Point police were called to investigate a report of what appeared to be a human skull found in the tree line behind the 4000 block of Janice Drive, and that detectives and the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office recovered it. WSB-TV reports that a man found the skull in the woods next to his backyard. FOX 5 Atlanta reports that authorities are investigating after search teams discovered a human skull in the area. All three accounts describe a skull. Nothing in the record compiled for this page describes any other human remains being recovered.

When was the skull found?
The accounts do not match, and this page does not pick a winner. Atlanta News First reports the discovery came “On Thursday evening” and describes it as having happened “last week.” WSB-TV dates it precisely: East Point Police Department “said someone called to report the discovery Thursday evening, Aug. 6.” FOX 5 Atlanta reports instead that authorities are investigating “after search teams discovered a human skull in the area on Tuesday morning.” Two owners put the discovery on a Thursday evening and Tuesday’s activity down as a follow-up search. One owner puts the discovery itself on Tuesday morning. Both versions are published here, attributed, and neither is merged into the other.

Where in East Point was it found?
Each newsroom locates it differently, and no two of them contradict each other. Atlanta News First names the 4000 block of Janice Drive and describes the tree line behind that area. WSB-TV does not name a street; it reports the skull was found in woods next to a man’s backyard, “in a subdivision near Interstate 285 and Camp Creek Parkway.” FOX 5 Atlanta does not name a street or a subdivision. The Local Alert publishes the block and the general area and does not publish a house number, a driveway or a coordinate. A person still lives at the address behind that tree line.

Has the person been identified?
Not in the record compiled for this page. Atlanta News First reports that detectives and the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office recovered the skull and “are working to identify the remains.” WSB-TV opens with the line that the medical examiner’s office “is working to connect a human skull to a name,” and reports that the station had asked the office whether investigators had matched the skull to a name. FOX 5 Atlanta reports that authorities “have not released the identity of the person or confirmed the cause of death.” No age, no sex, no ancestry, no cause of death and no manner of death appears in any of the three accounts this page rests on.

Were any other remains found?
This is the second place the three accounts split, and it is the sharpest one. Atlanta News First reports that officers and the medical examiner’s office returned Tuesday with Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue and “used cadaver dogs to search for any additional skeletal remains, but didn’t find any, police said.” WSB-TV reports that “Tuesday night, police confirmed they did not find any additional bones.” FOX 5 Atlanta reports that the search team “arrived around 9 a.m. with cadaver dogs, which hit on a specific area and uncovered additional evidence to assist crime scene investigators and the medical examiner.” Two owners report nothing more was found. One owner reports additional evidence was uncovered. This page prints both and resolves neither.

What are the unmarked graves people are talking about?
They are a description given by one man to one newsroom, and they are not a police finding. WSB-TV quotes Angel Alonso, who runs the volunteer group that assisted police, saying: “We did find some unmarked graves back in the back.” He added: “Like a private-type cemetery.” WSB-TV reports that Alonso said police took photos, and that detectives “did not confirm a connection between the graves and the skull Tuesday night.” No investigator is quoted anywhere in the record compiled for this page describing graves, a cemetery or any link between the two. Treat the graves as an account from a volunteer searcher, because that is exactly what the source makes them.

Who is Angel Alonso?
The two newsrooms that mention him describe his role differently. WSB-TV reports that “Angel Alonso runs the nonprofit group of volunteers trained to search for missing people and recover evidence.” FOX 5 Atlanta describes the information in its story as gathered from “Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue team member Angel Alonso.” He is quoted by WSB-TV saying “We got a call from East Point to assist them,” and that the group was asked to “come out and bring our cadaver dogs out and search the area and see if we can find any more evidence of a body.” He is a volunteer searcher. He is not a police officer, a detective, a medical examiner or an investigator, and nothing he says is an official finding.

What is Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue?
A volunteer nonprofit, not a government agency. FOX 5 Atlanta reports that the team “consists of nearly 150 volunteers across the state, including former first responders, military veterans, paramedics, and law enforcement officers,” and that it “provides free search assistance using cadaver dogs, drones, sonar, and all-terrain vehicles to help families and law enforcement locate missing people.” WSB-TV describes it as a nonprofit group of volunteers trained to search for missing people and recover evidence. A volunteer group has no arrest power, no custody of evidence and no authority to determine a cause of death. It searches when an agency or a family asks it to.

Which agency is actually investigating?
The East Point Police Department, a city police department, with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office handling the remains. Those are two separate offices with two separate jobs, and neither is the Fulton County Police Department, the Atlanta Police Department or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Nothing in the record compiled for this page places the GBI, the Fulton County Police Department or any federal agency in this case. Georgia Emergency Search and Rescue is a volunteer nonprofit that assisted at the request of East Point police, according to Angel Alonso in WSB-TV’s account, and is not an agency at all.

What does the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office do?
It is the office that determines cause and manner of death in Fulton County. Its own page on the Fulton County government website says the office works “to determine the cause and manner of death and to clarify the circumstances surrounding death,” and that it investigates deaths occurring in the county or where a body is discovered there. Georgia law, at O.C.G.A. § 45-16-24, requires that a death be reported to the coroner or county medical examiner in a list of situations that includes a death resulting from violence, a death occurring in any suspicious or unusual manner, and a death unattended by a physician. Human remains found in a tree line fall squarely inside that duty to report.

How does a medical examiner identify unidentified remains?
In general terms, through comparison, not recognition. A skull alone rules out several of the usual routes: there are no fingerprints to run and often no recognizable face to show anyone. What is left is forensic anthropology to estimate a biological profile, forensic odontology comparing the teeth to dental records once someone suggests a name to compare against, and DNA, which is compared either to a relative’s sample or to a database. Every one of those methods needs something on the other side of the comparison. That is the part families are rarely told: an unidentified person stays unidentified until a candidate name exists, and the science confirms or excludes it rather than producing a name out of nothing.

How long does identification take?
There is no fixed timeline, and anyone promising one is guessing. A case where a name is suggested within days and dental records exist can close quickly. A case with no candidate name can stay open for years, because there is nothing to compare the remains against. Skeletal DNA work is slower and harder than DNA from fresh tissue, laboratory queues are real, and a positive identification generally has to be confirmed before it is announced. The Local Alert does not know where this case sits on that range, and does not guess. This page is a record of what three newsrooms published, and it makes no promise to revisit the question.

What is NamUs, and can a family use it directly?
NamUs is the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a federal resource that describes itself as “a national centralized repository and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases across the United States.” It covers three case types: missing persons, unidentified persons and unclaimed persons. It is free. Its own site says it “provides free forensic services, to include forensic odontology, fingerprint examination, forensic anthropology, and DNA analyses,” and that “Family DNA collection kits are also provided at no cost.” Families can enter a missing person case themselves, which matters, because a missing person case that exists in NamUs is a case an unidentified remains case can eventually be matched against.

How do I get the incident report from East Point police?
Ask the East Point Police Department’s Records and Identification Section. The City of East Point lists the department at 2727 East Point Street, East Point, GA 30344, gives a non-emergency number of (404) 761-2170 and a Records and Identification Section number of (404) 902-2609, and says that section handles police incident and accident reports Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM. Under the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71, an agency must produce responsive records for inspection within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days, and where records will take longer it must provide a description of such records and a timeline for when they will be available. Expect the initial incident report and expect the investigative file to be another matter entirely.

What help exists in Georgia for a family waiting on an identification?
Two practical things. First, file or update a missing person report with the law enforcement agency where the person went missing, and ask that the case be entered into NamUs, because a case that is not in the system cannot be matched by the system. Second, if a death is eventually ruled a homicide, the Georgia Crime Victims Compensation Program, administered by the state Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, pays up to $25,000 per victim per victimization, with sub-caps that include $6,000 for funeral expenses and $3,000 for counseling. That program generally requires the crime to have been reported to authorities within 72 hours and, for crimes on or after July 1, 2014, an application within three years. Neither of those steps is a comment on this case, which has no identified victim and no determined manner of death in the record compiled for this page.