Boston area native identified as victim in 1982 Ohio pedestrian crash

A man killed in a pedestrian crash in Boardman, Ohio, has been identified after over 40 years, thanks to the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization that works to identify John and Jane Does.

The man was positively identified as 41-year-old Charles Joseph Nunnenman III. Nunnenman was born in Waltham in 1941 and grew up in the Boston area, but he had last been known to be living in Los Angeles, according to the DNA Doe Project’s release. His connection to Ohio remains a mystery. 

The release states that Nunnenman, previously known as “Western Reserve John Doe,” was walking on Western Reserve Road in Boardman, Ohio, on Aug. 12, 1982, when he was struck by a car traveling in the same direction. The 18-year-old driver left the scene but later turned herself in. No identification was found on the victim, and the case soon went cold. 

The case was reopened by Sheriff’s Investigator James Ciotti in May 2022, and the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office later brought the case to the DNA Doe Project. Funded by the Porchlight Project, an Ohio nonprofit that funds research on cold cases involving missing persons, genealogists uploaded the victim’s DNA profile to the GEDmatch database. The only matches were very distant relatives, but it was determined that the John Doe had recent ancestry in Ireland. 

Experts had better luck with the FamilyTreeDNA database, which found a woman who shared nearly 2% of her DNA with the man. From there, they identified a man born in Ireland in 1836 as a likely ancestor and mapped out his descendants, some of whom had immigrated to Massachusetts. This led them to Nunnenman, whose identity was confirmed by a DNA sample from his niece, Natalie Bauerle of Florida, obtained by the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office last fall.

According to WKBN, Bauerle stated that her uncle had died before she was born, but her mother, who died in 2020, had asked her for help in searching the internet for information on his whereabouts. Her mother had lost contact with Nunnenman when she got married and moved to Indiana.

“It was kind of like the closure for my mom who never got the closure,” Bauerle told WKBN in a phone interview. Bauerle did not know why her uncle would have been in Ohio.

The Waltham Times wasn’t able to locate any family members of Nunnenman who may still be in the Waltham or Boston area. 

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