The Whitfield County Coroner’s Office is using a new forensic tool to aid in death investigations and give victims’ families closure faster. The tool, a portable fingerprint scanner, was donated to the office in December by ATLBio. It’s already helped investigators with a case last month.
Clyde McDaniel, Whitfield’s County Coroner, told Local 3 News that the scanner will help jump-start investigations.
“We had a case last summer where we had a body…but we did not have a positive I.D. We knew they had fingerprints on file, but we didn’t have a way to check that out, so we sent the body out to the medical examiner’s office at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Two and a half weeks later, we were able to get that information back… The family was kind of in limbo,” said Whitfield County Coroner Clyde McDaniel.
The new scanner will help take additional cases off GBI’s already strained workload and save the county money on transport services.
“[The county] has to pay a transport service to take them down, and if, for some reason, the family hasn’t decided on the funeral home or whatever, sometimes they’ll have to have somebody to pick them up from GBI and bring them back. You’re talking about hundreds of dollars that the county has to pay to do this,” said Ashley Haley, the owner of ALTBio.
ATLBio Owner, Ashley Haley, told Local 3 News that Whitfield County reached out to them in 2025 about the need they had to speed up the identification process.
“They had a need, so they reached out, and we said, ‘Hey, let’s get you guys this.’. They need it… To me, the price of this machine is worth every penny to get families closure,” said Haley.
McDaniel shared that in the death investigation at the end of January, he was able to successfully use the scanner.
“The other day, we used it, and within about a minute, we had a positive ID… It pretty much has a cell phone built into it. It’s linked to GBI’s database. It shows you the fingerprint as you put it on [the scanner] to make sure you got a good scan, and it’ll pop up with a reading if it gets a hit,” said McDaniel.
Whitfield is one of the first counties in North Georgia to get this forensic tool. McDaniel explained that other area coroners have reached out to his office to learn how the device works and how it can impact their workload.
“I’ve talked to some of the other corners to let them know that I have it, so it may be something that we can use in other counties as well… The quicker I can get a family confirmation, that it either is or it’s not their loved one, the quicker that they can start the grieving process,” said McDaniel.
