MARTIN COUNTY, Fla. — The case of "Baby June" is strikingly similar to a much older case out of Martin County.
"Baby Moses" was also a newborn discovered dead in the water in the 1980s.
But closing that case has proven to be a much more complicated task.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office announced this week that after four years, it has made an arrest in the death of Baby June.
Detectives said they arrested Baby June's mother, accused of dropping the baby in the ocean in Boynton Beach in 2018.
Those four years may have felt long to those wanting answers, but that wait was only a fraction of the time detectives in Martin County have been waiting to make an arrest in Baby Moses' case.
“We’ve already started studying Palm Beach’s case, the Baby June case. If we see something in there that helps us, we’ll do it,” said Martin County Sheriff William Snyder.
Baby Moses was a baby found dead and floating in the St. Lucie River in 1983.
“Using the technology that was available at the time, detectives did everything they could to identify the body,” Snyder said.
But that old technology at the time lead detectives to a dead end.
“They were not able to locate or identify the parents,” Snyder said.
The baby was eventually buried in a Stuart cemetery in the mix with other babies in unmarked graves.
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Poor documentation at the time made it hard for detectives years later to even guess which of the little bodies was that of Baby Moses.
But in 2016, detectives exhumed those tiny, frail remains with hopes that newer DNA technology could help them identify which baby was Baby Moses, and who its parents were.
A forensics team tried pulling DNA from those poorly preserved bones.
“The degradation of the remains was such that technology we have today is not able to determine who the baby was,” Snyder said.
Technology still is not updated enough to get a match on 40-year-old DNA. That’s what still keeps Martin County detectives from getting the answers Palm Beach County detectives are learning about Baby June.
“They had a leg up, because they had fresher remains, obviously, and they were able to use modern DNA techniques that don’t work on our case,” Snyder said.
But all hope is not lost. As DNA technology continues to advance, Baby Moses’ remains will be tested over and over again through the years.
“There is a hope someday that with advances in DNA technology we may yet bring justice to this case,” Snyder said.
