Thirty-five years ago, a farmer in Paris Township in Portage County noticed a shiny object protruding from the ground in one of his fields. It was a shallow grave.
Buried there was a man who died from blunt force trauma to the head, said Robert Wain, Chief Investigator for the Portage County Coroner’s Office. Since 1988, it was an unsolved homicide of an unidentified man, a John Doe in the coroner’s records.
Thanks to the computerization of decades-old records, and the determination of the coroner’s office, investigators now know the identity of the man and may be one step closer to solving his homicide.
“The Sheriff's Department did investigate and, really no leads, solid leads were able to determine who might have done this to this individual.” Wain said.
An autopsy was performed, and the body was buried in a cemetery in Paris Township.
"It always bothered me that we had a John Doe in our cemetery," Paris Township Trustee Ed Semec told the Ravenna Record-Courier.
While the cold case was revisited over the years, it wasn’t until 2023 that Wain found and revisited this John Doe while working on another case.
“So back in February of 2023, I was working in another case in Kent on some identified remains, and there's a national database, called NAMUS, where unidentified remains, missing persons — it's a database that includes all those individuals,” Wain said.
“I noticed this case on that database from 1988,” he said. “I was not familiar with the case. I was not here in 1988.”
Wain said he then reached out to the Portage County Sheriff’s Office and began coordinating to see if the person could be identified with new technology that has emerged since 1988.
“So, my initial inclination was that we'd be able to do some more advanced DNA testing,” Wain said. “I really thought that was the avenue we were going to go and be able to identify this person.”
As it turns out, the evidence that led to a break in the case was there all along.
“There was a fingerprint obtained in 1988. A single fingerprint from the deceased,” Wain said. “Back then, not all fingerprint records were computerized…A lot of stuff was done manually — comparison from card to card, and so the person was not identified based on that print back in 1988.”
They re-checked that single fingerprint with Ohio’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
“And they got a hit that actually identified this individual,” Wain said. “It was in a database that previously had not been, you know, computerized.”
The print matched in the FBI database with David Kaziateck, who was born Oct. 7, 1951, and whose last known address was in Warren, according to an email to the Record-Courier from Dominic Binkley, deputy press secretary with the attorney general's office.
“I believe it was a military record if I'm not mistaken,” Wain said.
Little is known about Kaziateck, but he was in the Marine Corps.
“This individual was known as a drifter, kind of a free spirit,” Wain said. “So that complicates things for us, you know, he, he moved around.”
The coroner’s office did speak with an ex-wife, and they did identify a daughter who lives out of state who has been notified.
The remains, still buried in the Paris Township cemetery, will now get a marker identifying them as David Kaziateck.
“After identifying this individual, the, the cemetery, Sexton along with, I believe, it was Dean's Funeral Home — the gentleman there — and the sheriff's office coordinated to get a marker for this individual,” Wain said.
Nearly 36 years later, Wain said they are still seeking a resolution to this investigation, and now that he has been identified, authorities are again asking that anyone who knows anything about Kaziateck or what happened to him come forward.
“It may not seem important but it may be very important to solving this once and for all,” Wain said.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Portage County Sheriff’s Office at 330-296-5100.
