By Paul Rubin
We had good reaction to our recent story on Suzi Dodt and the great work she's been doing as an investigator for the Office of the Maricopa County Medical Examiner.
People from as far away as Guam wrote to thank Dodt for her dogged public service. She pulls out all the stops to identify the nameless corpses in the county morgue.
We led the story with an in-depth description of case number 99-305, a teenage girl who died January 27, 1999, after tumbling out of a speeding car on Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Casa Grande.
Dodt and her colleagues were baffled as to the identity of the young woman since nobody ever contacted them about her, despite her picture appearing on Dodt's "unidentifieds" page on the medical examiner's Web site.
Word came to us a few minutes ago that 99-305 has been identified as Tawni Lee Mazzone.
This is a hell of a turn of events in a hell of a yarn, and we promise to provide the details in the coming days. Sad, but very cool news that her identity finally has been returned to her.