The Strange Case of the Montecito Mudslide Human Remains

Have the remains of a teenager missing since 2018 been found? Or was it just wishful thinking by an anthropologist trying to get tenure despite her record of misconduct?

Note: This story was originally published today on Balter’s Blog.

Montecito mudslide, Jan 2018/ U.S. Coast Guard photo/ Wikimedia Commons



Early in the morning of January 9, 2018, the wealthy suburb of Montecito, California, just east of Santa Barbara, was hit with an avalanche of mud that destroyed numerous homes and took 23 lives. After a devastating fire in the hills above the town, followed by a huge downpour of rain, there was nothing to stop the earth and debris that bore down on the unprepared inhabitants. Two of the dead and missing, a small child and a teenager, were not recovered by rescuers.

There would be a lot of recriminations in the months to come, as Santa Barbara County officials were blamed for the lack of preparation. The people of Montecito were angry, and many still are. One of the dead was Dave Cantin, a popular local Scoutmaster, whose body was found washed down near the Pacific Ocean beach. Dave's wife, Kim, was spared, as was their daughter, Lauren. But despite extensive searching, their teenage son, Jack Cantin, was never found. But Kim never gave up hoping that one day he would be laid to rest. Neither did many of her neighbors.
In January of this year, Kim Cantin approached the University of California, Santa Barbara to see if any of its scientists could help with the search. UCSB put her in touch with Danielle Kurin, an archaeologist and forensic anthropologist at the university. For Kurin, the timing could not be better. She was up for tenure, and it was not sure that she was going to get it. There were two reasons for that. 

First, Kurin had recently come back to work from a three-year administrative leave after the university, in a Title IX proceeding, had found that she had retaliated multiple times against students who had reported her former husband--a Peruvian archaeologist who worked with Kurin at sites in and around the city of Andahuaylas--for sexual harassment. Many of her colleagues in the university's anthropology department, along with archaeologists across the United States and Peru, felt she was a "danger to students" (as many put it in just those word) and should not be rewarded for her documented misconduct. Feelings were even stronger after her colleagues found out that her husband was accused of sexually assaulting a student in 2018, and that Kurin was kicked out of a field school umbrella organization for failing to provide a safe environment for the students.

Second, in June 2020, Kurin had sued me, the journalist who reported on her misconduct with the help of many survivors and other witnesses, for defamation. After 13 months the case was eventually settled; but very recently, after Kurin violated the settlement agreement, I declared the agreement null and void.

Obviously I am not objective where Kurin is concerned, and I expect that any discerning reader will examine what I say carefully to see how well I back it up. However, what I can say is that during the litigation, my attorneys and I received thousands of pages of documents in discovery, and that every page backed up my reporting fully. Indeed, some of the documents revealed additional details we were not originally aware of, which only made the case against Kurin worse and more definitive.
Very shortly after Kurin agreed to help try to find Jack Cantin's remains, her department met to decide its recommendation on her tenure bid. According to several sources, the verdict was thumbs down. That left the decision to the university administration, which overruled the department's recommendation in August and awarded her tenure. I have heard a number of hypotheses as to why UCSB gave her tenure, ranging from threats by Kurin to sue the university--something she had also done back in 2016 when she was denied a promotion while on administrative leave--to a deal by the university to award her tenure if she dropped the lawsuit against me, which was very embarrassing to the institution, to possible pressure from Kurin's father, Richard Kurin, a major official at the Smithsonian Institution and a very powerful scientist who is widely feared by Danielle's colleagues. I don't know whether any of these scenarios are correct, or whether the truth could involve a combination of all of them.

But the university took no public action between February 2021, when the department was likely to have passed on its recommendation, and August 2021, when tenure was awarded.

In the meantime, Kurin and her volunteers worked in the hills of Montecito, trying to find the remains of Jack Cantin.

On July 14, 2021, Kurin and I signed the settlement agreement, and she applied to the court to dismiss the case the same day. The following day, U.S. District Judge Vincent Briccetti of the Southern District of New York, who was overseeing the litigation, approved the settlement and ended the lawsuit.

On July 22, seven days later, Kurin and Kim Cantin announced to the media that Jack Cantin's remains had been found. Kurin told reporters that she was "90 percent" sure that the remains belonged to Jack, and provided the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Office with a one-page fact sheet explaining her findings. However--and this is a very key part of the story--the remains were reportedly found nearly two months earlier, over Memorial Day weekend, by Kurin and her team.

The delayed reporting of the remains to county officials clearly put the Sheriff's Office in a tricky situation. In a terse statement issued later on July 22, the Office made it clear that they were not taking Kurin's word for it, pending their own investigation; and, that they had found out from a media report rather than from Kurin directly. It is worth citing the statement in full:

"Today the Sheriff’s Office received the KEYT news story that indicated that the remains of Jack Cantin, a 17-year-old who has been missing and presumed dead since the devastating 1/9 Debris Flow in 2018, had been found.

Later today the Sheriff / Coroner’s Office received, and is in the process of reviewing, a one-page 'Fast Fact Forensic Report' prepared by a UCSB anthropologist, Dr. Danielle Kurin, that was referenced in today’s news story. In the 'Fast Fact' report she opined that the remains 'are consistent with those of Jack Cantin,' and that she is 'over 90% certain that these remains are those of Jack Cantin.'

Sheriff / Coroner investigators are seeking the full report from Dr. Kurin. Once obtained, it will be reviewed as part of the ongoing investigation. In the meantime, the case of Jack Cantin’s disappearance remains open. We will continue to work closely with the Cantin family on this case, as we have since the day he disappeared."

The local media, however, cast little doubt on Kurin's claim, and a number of stories--at least in their headlines--declared flatly that Jack had been found.

As I write, however, the Sheriff's Office, along with the country medical examiner and coroner, have not announced the results of their own investigation of the remains, which is still ongoing. Raquel Zick, the Sheriff's spokesperson, told me that there are a "lot of moving parts" to the investigation and that one reason for the delay (now more than three months) is that they were still awaiting Kurin's more detailed report. And that, she told me, was delayed because Kurin wanted to have it "peer reviewed," even though it is not an academic paper.

I have talked to a number of law enforcement sources and anthropologists about the two-month delay between the supposed finding of the human remains and the announcement to the media (not to law enforcement, as I mentioned above). They were unanimous that holding onto the remains, or even removing them from where they were found before notifying law enforcement, was a violation of California's Health and Safety Code concerning the handling of dead bodies. The relevant section reads:

(b)  In the event of discovery or recognition of any human remains in any location other than a dedicated cemetery, there shall be no further excavation or disturbance of the site or any nearby area reasonably suspected to overlie adjacent remains until the coroner of the county in which the human remains are discovered has determined, in accordance with Chapter 10 (commencing with Section 27460) of Part 3 of Division 2 of Title 3 of the Government Code, that the remains are not subject to the provisions of Section 27491 of the Government Code or any other related provisions of law concerning investigation of the circumstances, manner and cause of any death, and the recommendations concerning the treatment and disposition of the human remains have been made to the person responsible for the excavation, or to his or her authorized representative, in the manner provided in Section 5097.98 of the Public Resources Code. The coroner shall make his or her determination within two working days from the time the person responsible for the excavation, or his or her authorized representative, notifies the coroner of the discovery or recognition of the human remains.

In other words, according to the experts I have consulted, neither Kurin nor Kim Cantin (with whom we must have considerable sympathy) had the right to remove the remains and examine them in any way. As one leading American forensic anthropologist put it to me, after I asked them to comment without specifying the circumstances other than that it concerned a mudslide victim (I also promised them anonymity so they could opine freely):

Ethical questions are often difficult ones especially in the abstract.  On the surface the scenario you describe is odd.  In many states when a forensic scientist encounters human remains they are required to contact authorities, usually an ME [medical examiner] or law enforcement. This is especially true if the remains are known to be recent enough for a possible I.d.  Is it possible that the remains are “premodern” and unlikely to be identifiable?  Could the conditions of discovery indicate that the mudslide occurred many decades ago…or longer?  If the remains are, say 100 years old or more, then the laws and probably the ethics are variable among jurisdictions.  Having said that, if the remains are associated with recent events (a known mudslide?) then I would question, on both legal and ethical grounds, the decision not to contact authorities. 

Obviously the circumstances remain murky. Zick would not tell me whether or not the Sheriff was looking into possible legal issues in the case, and neither Kurin nor her attorney have responded to a number of questions I have posed to them about those circumstances (not surprisingly, of course.) Nor, to date, has the UCSB press office responded to questions about what they knew about Kurin's work in this area, whether they were informed after Memorial Day that she had purportedly found the remains, where the remains were analyzed, and other relevant questions.

Based on certain indications I have been given, I believe that the Sheriff's Office will be closing its investigation and announcing its own conclusions fairly soon. Until then, the identity of the remains found by Kurin and her volunteers remains an open question.