STEPHEN JERGUSON
Long Shot: How a New DNA Search Tool found Justice for Baby Nikko and his Four Murdered Siblings
Michelle Halsing, Assistant Lab Director, California Department of Justice, Missing Persons DNA Program
The long road for Justice for Baby Nikko began with the 2007 discovery of a murdered infant’s skeleton inside a submerged ice chest in Yolo County. There were no leads or clues as to the infant’s name or who had killed him. In 2018 the California Department of Justice Missing Person's DNA Program (MPDP) created a new DNA search program, the Kinship Search. Yolo County's Baby Doe was the first “long shot” search for this program…and what it revealed led to discoveries that shocked everyone involved in the investigation.
Stephen Jerguson is currently an Investigator with the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office, where he is assigned to Cold Case Investigations. In that role, he serves as a TFO with the FBI's Sacramento Field Office Violent Crimes Task Force, and he focuses primarily on working Homicides and Sexual Assaults involving Investigative Genetic Genealogy.
Jerguson's career in law enforcement began in 2008 as a Police Officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, where he worked a variety of uniformed and plainclothes assignments before moving to California in 2015.