“The current posture of that is that we are not connected to the internet, intentionally, and this may exist for another few days to a couple of weeks,” Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Thomas Temple said Wednesday in a teleconference call from his courtroom.
“I don’t know what the result is,” he said, but noted, “we will not be able to have a Zoom hearing this week” as planned.
Aside from a week’s worth of hearings in February in which the attorneys appeared in the courtroom, more recent pretrial hearings in the case have relied on videoconference, with only the judge appearing from the courtroom. Witnesses and attorneys have appeared via Zoom while defendant Steven Downs, 46, of Auburn has listened in and spoken by phone from jail.
The genetic information derived by Parabon from the crime scene DNA evidence was provided to a Florida company called GEDmatch, which uses DNA information submitted by genealogy DNA testing services.
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DNA expert says she found suspect Steven Downs through profile matching in 1993 Alaska murder case
The murder trial for Steven Downs, an Auburn man accused in a 1993 murder case out of Fairbanks, Alaska, continues.
Steven Downs appears in Androscoggin County Superior Court in Auburn in March 2019 for an extradition hearing.
Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
A self-described professional genetic genealogist testified Thursday that she was the one who identified an Auburn man as a match for DNA found at the scene of a murdered woman in Alaska more than two decades ago.
CeCe Moore, who has appeared in a television network series called “The Genetic Detective,” said she was working for a DNA testing company as an investigator in 2018 when Alaska State Police submitted DNA evidence discovered in 20-year-old Sophie Sergie, who was found dead in a dormitory bathroom at University of Alaska at Fairbanks on April 25, 1993.