Man shot in the head in desert 47 years ago identified

Police have identified the remains of a man found in a shallow grave near a lake 47 years ago after searching previously unavailable fingerprint records.

The body of Luis Alonso Paredes was discovered by hikers on the border of Arizona and Nevada in 1976.

He was finally identified after fingerprints taken at the time were checked against all those on a national database not available at the time, the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said on Tuesday.

Paredes’s remains were found on 23 November 1976, in a desert area in northwestern Arizona, just east of Lake Mohave.

He was from El Salvador and may have been living or working in the Las Vegas area at the time of his death, investigators have said.

A post-mortem carried out at the time showed he was probably in his early to mid-30s and had been shot in the head at close range, the sheriff’s office said.

Despite authorities collecting fingerprints and drawing up a composite image of him, the case soon went cold and the victim remained nameless for nearly five decades before the investigation was relaunched in October.

Officers compared the fingerprints to all available records and eventually identified him.

So far, investigators haven’t been able to find any of Paredes’s relatives but have revealed he may have worked for the US Coast Guard and the Navy in the San Francisco area about a decade before his death.

The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office have asked the public to contact them with any information about the case or any leads which could help find his surviving relatives.

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