The remains found in a vacant Reading home have been identified as a 47-year-old city man, and his death is being investigated as a homicide.
A forensic investigation by the Berks County coroner’s office determined the remains are of Jose Rodriguez-Figueroa Jr., Coroner Matthew J. Stitzel announced Wednesday.
Reading police are conducting a homicide investigation.
“We are now moving beyond the identification phase and looking for any information that may lead us to identify the perpetrator of this homicide,” District Attorney John T. Adams said Wednesday.
Adams said Rodriguez-Figueroa hadn’t been seen for months, but investigators don’t have a time frame for how long Rodriguez-Figueroa had been missing.
“Based on the forensic anthropologist’s examination, it is most likely that the body had been there for many months,” Adams said.
Adams said he was uncertain if Rodriguez-Figueroa was killed in the house.
He declined to say how Rodriguez-Figueroa was killed.
Police were called to the building at 549 S. Sixth St. on Oct. 2 to meet the owner of the recently purchased property who discovered what appeared to be human remains, officials said. The property has been listed by the city as blighted for more than a decade.
Stitzel said his office’s investigation involved multiple forensic disciplines, including an autopsy performed by a forensic pathologist, examination by a forensic odontologist, forensic entomology analysis and assistance from two teams of forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida in Tampa.
After information about the case was released, Stitzel said, several families contacted the coroner’s office with descriptions of missing loved ones.
That information helped investigators narrow the possibilities and focus their efforts on establishing the person’s identity, he said.
The forensic anthropology team from the University of South Florida subsequently compared the available information with medical records and confirmed the identity as Rodriguez-Figueroa.