19 Years After A Dissolved Adoption Caused Her to Flee from CPS, A Murdered Adoptee Is Identified

Shannon Aumuck was born to a sixteen-year-old mother, a victim of sexual assault, and was placed into foster care when she was 3. ” Shannon was adopted at that age by a Flagstaff family who later lived in Scottsdale, but because of what they said were “uncontrollable behavioral issues,” gave her back to CPS when she was 12.”

“Aumock’s cause of death was strangulation, according to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office. She was never listed as missing because about a month before her death, she ran away from the last group home she was in under CPS care soon after she was released from the Adobe Mountain Detention Center, Somershoe said.

CPS petitioned the court to relinquish their responsibility of her since she had run away so many times and the last time, could not find her.

Aumock, who had just turned 16, did not have a driver’s license, a job or a Social Security number. No one called authorities to offer any information or tips even after a composite sketch of the girl was released to the public.”

“She was tossed aside in death as she was in life,” said Detective Stuart Somershoe of the Phoenix Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit, who began investigating her case with his partner, Will Anderson, last fall.

What got the attention of the missing persons detectives about Aumock’s case that they began investigating last fall is that she was brutally murdered and no one called to report her missing.”

Forensic Anthropology and Shannon’s Biological Mother

“Against what a forensic anthropologist for the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office said was “astronomical odds,” Aumock’s biological mother still lived in the Valley. Aumock’s mother provided her DNA to Phoenix police detectives, who began reviewing 1,600 reports on runaways between 1991 and 1994 last fall hoping to identify the girl. Aumock was wearing an orange flower-covered shirt, blue jeans, a black bow in her hair and her pink thick glasses were found near her body.

“She was on our radar ever since I walked through the door of the medical examiner’s office in June, 1992, when I began working there,” said Dr. Laura Fulginiti, a forensic psychologist for the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office. “We were thinking we were going to get her identified right away. It didn’t happen. It took good old-fashioned police grunt work to figure this one out.”

With the help of an ongoing $138,000 federal grant received by the county through the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission and National Institute of Justice to fund research for unidentified deaths, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office has exhumed 24 bodies this year and has identified four of them.”

1992 slaying victim identified, exhumed from Tempe cemetery
[East Valley Tribune 3/22/11 by Mike Sakal]

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