Every unidentified person is someone’s child, parent, sibling, or friend. And somewhere, there may still be a family wondering where they went.

But here’s the disturbing part: sometimes, they’ve already been found.

A person can disappear in one state while their remains are discovered somewhere else. Their family continues searching. The unidentified person is given a case number. And unless those two cases are connected, months can turn into years.

No family should spend years searching for someone whose body has already been found.

One case that shows just how devastating this disconnect can be is that of 16-year-old Marci Bachmann.

Marci disappeared from Vancouver, Washington, in May 1984. Just months later, her remains were discovered near Deer Creek outside Missoula, Montana. Investigators didn’t know who she was, so she became known only as “Debbie Deer Creek.”

Meanwhile, Marci’s family was still looking for her.

Her brother spent nearly two decades searching for his sister, even hiring a private investigator. What he didn’t know was that Marci had already been found hundreds of miles away.

It wasn’t until DNA eventually connected the unidentified remains with Marci’s family that the two cases finally came together. In April 2006, more than 21 years after her remains were discovered, “Debbie Deer Creek” finally got her name back. The National Institute of Justice has highlighted Marci’s case when discussing the national problem of missing persons and unidentified remains.

For more than two decades, Marci wasn’t missing. Her name was.

That’s exactly why NamUs exists.

NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, is a free federal database and resource center designed to help investigators compare missing-person records with unidentified remains across jurisdictions. But despite being a national system, its use still isn’t federally mandated nationwide.

Congress took an important step with Billy’s Law in 2022, which formally authorized NamUs and directed work toward transferring eligible missing- and unidentified-person records from the FBI’s NCIC system. But gaps remain. NamUs itself acknowledges that because its use is not federally mandated, the database does not contain every missing, unidentified, or unclaimed person in the country.

And these gaps can be especially complicated in communities already affected by missing-person data disparities, including Indigenous communities, where cases may cross tribal, local, state, and federal jurisdictions.

Families should not lose months or years because agencies in different jurisdictions are not required to use the same national tool. A person’s chance of being identified should not depend on the state where their remains are found.

We are calling on the U.S. House and Senate to pass bipartisan legislation requiring every qualifying unidentified-person case to be entered into NamUs within a fixed, reasonable timeframe, with funding, training, privacy safeguards, and clear accountability for law enforcement, coroners, and medical examiners.

Because somewhere in this country, a family may still be searching for someone who has already been found.

These people weren’t missing. Their names were.

Sign this petition and tell Congress to create one national standard, because every person deserves their name back, and every family deserves answers.