Danielle Kurin & Team Locate Presumptive Remains of CA Mudslide Victim

​A January 2018 mudslide in Montecito, Califonia killed Eagle Scout Jack Cantin, a junior at Santa Barbara High School. Tragically, the mudslide claimed the lives of 23 people in total, including Jack Cantin’s father. The mudslide also injured over 150 people and destroyed more than 400 homes. First Responders rescued Jack's sister, Lauren, alive, from a pile of debris and mud. Meanwhile, the bodies of Jack Cantin and Lydia Sutthithepa, a two-year-old girl, remained missing, despite extensive search efforts. In the weeks and months following the disaster, community members worked tirelessly to discover remains by digging through heaps of mud and debris. Despite their best efforts, they were unable to find the remains of the children among the approximately 4 million buckets of debris.

In 2020, Jack's mother, Kim Cantin, contacted the anthropology department at The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB, UC Santa Barbara) in an attempt to recruit the assistance of experts there. One faculty member, Danielle Kurin, founding director of the Walker Bioarchaeology and Forensic Bone Lab, responded. Together with a team of researchers, Kurin was eager to help Kim Cantin and the community find out what happened to the missing.

Kurin and her colleagues used a number of field and analytical approaches to find Jack Cantin's remains. Their findings were based on a variety of sources, including interviews with residents, survivors, first responders, and coroners' reports from previous years, as well as eyewitness stories, aerial footage, photographs, and satellite imagery of the catastrophe zone. Using these methods, they were able to locate specific "hot zones" within the 110-acre search area. While on site, they conducted targeted surveys, soil sampling, and test pitting.

After over 14 months of searching, in cooperation with local authorities, and with the help of human remains and cadaver detection dogs, the crew discovered a debris slump downstream of the Cantin home that was full of pieces of furnishings, fixtures, and personal effects from Jack's bedroom--the place he was sheltering in when the disaster struck. During the mudslide, many of Jack's possessions became caught in the fishnet-like weave of an oriental rug from his bedroom. It was in this context, and within the tattered remnants of clothing Jack was wearing at the time, that the team found several miniscule, very poorly preserved, fragments of bone. Kurin and the team examined, documented, and analyzed the fragments and determined that the remains were consistent with being human and of recent origin, and reported and turned them over to the coroner's office.

Ever mindful of the need to treat the remains with dignity, the research team deployed an arsenal of advanced, forensic, osteological, archaeometric, and  biogeochemical approaches to determine the approximate antiquity, height, sex, age-at-death, pathological conditions, peri-mortem trauma, and post-mortem damage of the bone fragments. Kurin’s team found that the results aligned with the biological profile of Jack Cantin, to the exclusion of other missing persons and unidentified remains, and submitted a detailed report to the county sheriff-coroner. A battery of different DNA tests--each more destructive than the last--yielded predictably inconclusive reports due to the degradation and contamination of the poorly-preserved fragments. Further testing would have destroyed all that remained, and Mrs. Cantin's wanted to have something left of Jack to bury; she did not want to bury an empty casket. Ultimately, Ms. Cantin prevailed, and the courts granted Kim's request to bury the precious remains; Jack's grave is next to his father's, on peaceful hill that overlooks the beautiful Montecito coast.

Kim Cantin tells the story of her unimaginable loss and the hope she found in the search for her son in her highly aclaimed and award-winning book, "Where Yellow Flowers Bloom," available for purchase on Amazon and from booksellers worldwide.

Danielle Kurin

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