Tara Baker (Georgia)
UGA law student Tara Baker was found murdered in her Athens apartment. The case went cold for 22 years until DNA genealogy identified her killer as Michael Daquon Polite in 2023.
On February 15, 2001, twenty-four-year-old Tara Baker, a first-year law student at the University of Georgia, was found murdered in her Athens apartment. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
The case went cold despite extensive investigation by Athens-Clarke County police and the GBI. DNA evidence was preserved from the crime scene.
In 2023, genetic genealogy led investigators to Michael Daquon Polite, who was 19 at the time of the murder and lived in the Athens area. His DNA matched the evidence from the scene.
Polite was arrested and charged with malice murder, felony murder, and rape. The case was one of many cold cases solved using investigative genetic genealogy techniques.
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