According to the city, a second body of a suspected victim of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has been discovered with a gunshot wound.
Dr. Phoebe Stubblefield, a forensic anthropologist, revealed that one of the three sets of remains excavated last week includes one victim with a gunshot wound, according to a statement released late Friday by Carson Colvin, a city spokesperson.
In order to eventually corroborate that the remains are those of massacre victims, investigators are searching for traces of trauma, such as bullet wounds.
According to the statement, a chunk of the bullet was taken from the head of the skeletal remains. The race of the individual and whether the remains belong to a victim of a massacre are unknown at this time.
Saturday, Stubblefield did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press.
The remains were found in a plain casket and are likely to be those of an adult male, consistent with information from 1921 reports. They were discovered in the same section of Oaklawn Cemetery where 18 massacre victims were purportedly interred.
The first remains with gunshot wounds were discovered in June 2021 and are currently undergoing DNA analysis at Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City.
The latest cemetery excavation in search of victims of the 1921 Race Massacre began on October 26 and has so far unearthed 26 unmarked graves. The work is anticipated to continue until November 18.
Four sets of the freshly discovered bones were excavated and sent to an on-site laboratory for examination.
The hunt for the graves of massacre victims began in 2020 and resumed in 2017 with the recovery of roughly thirty coffins.
Two of the fourteen sets of previously recovered remains that were transferred to Intermountain Forensics for analysis contained sufficient DNA to begin sequencing and construct a genealogical profile.
None of the remains have been recognized or confirmed as victims of the massacre, one of the most notorious instances of white mob violence against African-Americans in United States history.
In the racist violence, more than 1,000 homes were demolished, hundreds more were robbed, and a prosperous business corridor known as Black Wall Street was devastated.
The death toll was estimated by historians to be between 75 and 300, and generational riches was wiped off.