Foucrault said Coroner’s Office officials spoke with Kuhn’s former husband and mother, but had not contacted the daughter whose DNA was so vital to the identification.
“He was relieved but shocked at the same time,” said Foucrault, of Kuhn’s husband. “And more shocked than anything.”
With regards to the timing of the identification, Foucrault said the three-year lag following the daughter’s sample submission could be attributed to the bottleneck of pending cases waiting to be assessed by the Department of Justice.
He said the department’s staffing in Richmond is not commiserate with the need to process cases, which can lead long waits in pairing potential matches.
“There are people working on it all the time, but the staffing levels for those places are not consistent with the amount of people missing,” he said.
The identification closes the case for his department, said Foucrault, but he hopes it could offer Pacifica police additional information leading toward solving Kuhn’s cause of death, which is still yet to be determined.
Pacifica police Capt. Jake Spanheimer said law enforcement officials may revisit the case and search for further leads.
“We will have to go back and see where we left off and look at this person’s identify and see what her history was and whether there is anything to go off of,” he said, adding he did not recall that there was evidence of foul play at the time of Kuhn’s body discovery.