GALVESTON, Texas — A three-year-old Galveston mystery has been solved thanks to a DNA lab based in The Woodlands.
It was Mother's Day of 2020 when an island visitor noticed something strange on the beach near Kahala Drive on Galveston's West End and called police.
Editor's note: The video above originally aired in September of 2020.
“When officers arrived, they found a dark-skinned male, wearing swimming attire that floated up onto the beach,” Galveston Police Department detective Dannie Simpson told us a few months later.
The Galveston County Medical Examiner's Office determined the man had drowned. They estimated he was 18 to 35 years old, around 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds.
There were no missing person reports that matched the description. All police had to work with was a composite sketch by longtime HPD sketch artist Lois Gibson, who has since retired.
Galveston police and the M.E.'s office eventually turned to Othram, a DNA Lab that has solved several criminal cases and other mysteries from all over the country.
“We’re the first lab in the U.S. to do the entire process from evidence all the way to genealogy and ID completely in-house,” Othram CEO Dr. David Mittelman told us in 2020. “We know from genetic analysis that it’s very likely that the young man is not African American, that he is actually African, and we think he might belong to an ethnic group called Bantu.”
They were right.
GPD investigators reopened the cold case with a new theory that the victim might have been visiting Galveston from overseas.
They recently confirmed his identity as 24-year-old Calvin Mbwambo, an exchange student from Tanzania.
Detectives don't suspect foul play but they are trying to learn more about Mbwambo and the circumstances leading up to his death.