forensic investigation<\/a> by the Berks County coroner\u2019s office determined the remains are of Jose Rodriguez-Figueroa Jr., Coroner Matthew J. Stitzel announced Wednesday.<\/p>\nReading police are conducting a homicide investigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are now moving beyond the identification phase and looking for any information that may lead us to identify the perpetrator of this homicide,\u201d District Attorney John T. Adams said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Adams said Rodriguez-Figueroa hadn\u2019t been seen for months, but investigators don\u2019t have a time frame for how long Rodriguez-Figueroa had been missing.<\/p>\n
\u201cBased on the forensic anthropologist\u2019s examination, it is most likely that the body had been there for many months,\u201d Adams said.<\/p>\n
Adams said he was uncertain if Rodriguez-Figueroa was killed in the house.<\/p>\n
He declined to say how Rodriguez-Figueroa was killed.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Stitzel said his office\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
After information about the case was released, Stitzel said, several families contacted the coroner\u2019s office with descriptions of missing loved ones.<\/p>\n
That information helped investigators narrow the possibilities and focus their efforts on establishing the person\u2019s identity, he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The remains found in a vacant Reading home have been identified as a 47-year-old city man, and his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,202,182,139,28,128,130,129,706],"class_list":["post-306514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}