The Associated Press (www.ap.org) announced on October 8 that the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) has identified a man who died in an apparent hit-and-run accident 11 years ago in a small town outside Yakima, Washington – something that law enforcement officials and their computer tools have failed to do. Detective Pat Ditter of the Washington State Patrol searched with Google for about a week before identifying the victim as David Glen Lewis, 39, who died 1606 miles from his home in Amarillo, Texas, in 1993.
Lewis had no known ties to central Washington and his presence in the area is still a mystery. Relatives believe Lewis was kidnapped. Over the years, investigators in Yakima and Amarillo combed through missing-person databases in vain. Ditter said he turned to Google after reading a series of newspaper stories about long-unsolved missing-person cases. On October 4, officials at a laboratory in Texas confirmed a DNA match between the long unidentified pedestrian and Lewis' mother.
Lewis' brother, Larry, praised Ditter's persistence and said that if he hadn't looked at those cases, he and his family would still be back at square one, thinking David's alive and going to give him a call one of those days.
