Groundbreaking DNA lab in The Woodlands solves mysteries, identifies crime victims

THE WOODLANDS, Texas (KTRK) -- From a man dead for decades whose body was found weighted down in a Montgomery County lake to a young man's body found on the beach in Galveston more recently, the previously unidentified are given back their names, and a lab in the Woodlands is behind the breakthroughs.

"How rewarding is that work?" ABC13 reporter Jessica Willey asked.

"It's incredibly rewarding," David Mittelman replied. "We like working on problems here at Othram that have high-impact that others are not working on, so we're looking for high impact opportunities that are not being explored."

Mittelman is the CEO of Othram, a private lab with advanced DNA technology, recently featured on ABC's 20/20.

Typically, law enforcement compares DNA found on bodies or crime scenes to what's already in a national database called CODIS. What Othram can do is more powerful, Mittelman said.

"Instead of the 20 datapoints in CODIS, we use half a million datapoints. We can work from DNA that is in terrible shape-very degraded, chemically damaged that generally is hard to access with other DNA methods, and then we use this DNA information that we get, this half a million data points to identify people even if they are not in the database, by looking at nearest relatives, building up family trees, figuring out where in the world they might be from," he explained.

So, the young man's body on the beach found in 2020, once again became that of Calvin Mbwambo, a 26-year-old exchange student from Tanzania.

The body in the lake, discovered more than 40 years ago, became that of Clarence Wilson again, whose sister told Eyewitness News that they thought all these years he was just estranged.

"We just thought he was living in Texas," Gwen Tranum said in 2023. "We had no clue all this time he was dead."

Mittelman, who founded the lab with his wife in 2018, believes answers and justice are now possible for everyone.

Othram's website profiles their cases. The funding often comes from grants, police funds, and crowdfunding.

There are tens of thousands of unidentified people nationwide and nearly 350,000 unsolved homicides, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data.

To Mittelman, Othram's technology is another tool for law enforcement, making what was once unsolvable, no longer a mystery.

"In 2025, there is just no reason why anyone should be unidentified," he emphasized.

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