Human Identification in Mass Disasters: Analyzing Complex Tattoos in the Brumadinho Tragedy

Abstract

Background: The identification of victims in mass disasters is a challenging task, particularly when forensic teams must address fragmented human remains. Objectives: This article reports two necropsy cases from the 2019 collapse of the Brumadinho mine tailing dam, the largest humanitarian disaster in Brazilian history. Results: In both cases, identification was achieved through comparative anthropological analysis of complex tattoos. Positive identification was based on the presence of multiple coincident points between postmortem (PM) and antemortem (AM) photographic records of the tattoo designs, along with the absence of exclusionary elements. Conclusion: The authors propose that the comparative analysis of PM and AM tattoos should be more widely adopted as a low-cost, rapid identification method, particularly in complex forensic scenarios such as mass disasters and other challenging cases in the medical and forensic anthropology context.