---
title: "A teenager killed in a 1978 Riverside crash is identified 48 years later"
description: "For nearly half a century, one of four teenagers killed in a 1978 car crash in Riverside remained a nameless case file. This week, the county's coroner's bureau said forensic genetic genealogy had finally given him back his identity: Mark Alan Smith, 18."
category: "Los Angeles"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles
author: "Simone Bishop"
published: 2026-07-15T06:58:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-15T06:58:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/a-teenager-killed-in-a-1978-riverside-crash-is-identified-48-years-later
tags: ["riverside county", "cold case", "forensic genealogy", "dna", "coroner"]
---
# A teenager killed in a 1978 Riverside crash is identified 48 years later

For nearly half a century, one of four teenagers killed in a 1978 car crash in Riverside remained a nameless case file. This week, the county's coroner's bureau said forensic genetic genealogy had finally given him back his identity: Mark Alan Smith, 18.

Nearly 48 years after a deadly crash on a Riverside street, a name has been returned to one of its victims. The Riverside County Sheriff-Coroner's Bureau announced this week that it had identified an 18-year-old killed in the 1978 wreck as Mark Alan Smith, closing one of the county's oldest unidentified-remains cases.

## The crash

According to the coroner's account, [a Volkswagen Beetle carrying five teenagers was traveling west on Arlington Avenue in 1978 when the driver lost control, crossed the center divider and struck an oncoming sport utility vehicle](https://mynewsla.com/crime/2026/07/14/riverside-coroners-bureau-identifies-1978-crash-victim/). Four of the five occupants were killed. The driver, the lone survivor, was able to help identify three of the dead, but he could offer little about the fourth: he had met the young man only the day before and knew almost nothing about him.

And so, while three families were able to grieve by name, the fourth victim was recorded as unidentified, a case number rather than a person, for decades.

## How he was identified

The break came through the tools of modern forensics. With funding from a [federal Bureau of Justice Assistance program for missing and unidentified remains](https://mynewsla.com/crime/2026/07/14/riverside-coroners-bureau-identifies-1978-crash-victim/), investigators exhumed the remains to recover usable DNA. The nonprofit GenGenies then carried out forensic genetic genealogy, the technique that builds family trees from DNA shared with relatives in consumer databases and cross-references them against public records, to trace a path from an anonymous genetic profile to a name.

That work led to Mark Alan Smith, and to relatives who had spent years without answers. The coroner's bureau said the identification brought the family a measure of long-awaited closure.

## A wider shift

Smith's case is one of a growing number of decades-old mysteries being solved the same way. Forensic genetic genealogy, the method that helped crack the Golden State Killer case in 2018, has since been turned on hundreds of cold cases across the country, both to name unidentified victims and to find suspects. Unlike traditional DNA matching, which depends on a profile already sitting in a law-enforcement database, genealogy can generate an investigative lead from DNA alone by mapping how a person is related to others.

For the coroner's offices that hold shelves of unidentified remains, the technology has changed what is possible, allowing them to reach back across decades to cases once considered unsolvable. For the family of Mark Alan Smith, it meant that a young man lost on a Riverside road in 1978 is, at last, no longer unknown.

## Sources

- [Riverside coroner's bureau identifies 1978 crash victim](https://mynewsla.com/crime/2026/07/14/riverside-coroners-bureau-identifies-1978-crash-victim/)
- [Teen killed in Southern California crash in 1978 finally identified](https://ktla.com/news/california/riverside-1978-crash-victim-identified/)