SACRAMENTO, Calif._The Butte County Sheriff's Office reduced the number of dead in the Camp Fire from 86 to 85 on Wednesday after an unidentified bone fragment was connected with a previously identified victim.
Butte law enforcement officials said in a news release they consulted with anthropologists from the California State University, Chico, identification lab to determine that a bone fragment that had been labeled unidentified belonged to Robert Quinn, 74, of Paradise, who was named as a victim of the wildfire in January.
The bone fragment was found among Quinn's remains during his initial autopsy, but anthropologists thought it may have belonged to another victim to a size disparity when compared with the rest of his remains. It was too badly burned to analyze for DNA.
Anthropologists later determined that the fragment had been shrunk by the Camp Fire's extreme heat. The Sheriff's Office said the evidence is circumstantial but enough to confidently say it belonged to Quinn.
The Camp Fire, one of the deadliest wildfires in the state of California, burned through Butte County in November 2018 and ravaged the small town of Paradise.
The Sheriff's Office has identified 85 dead and one more unidentified victim remains.
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