After nearly 36 years, David Ralph Kaziateck is no longer “John Doe.”
Now investigators want to find out who killed him and buried him in a Paris Township field.
The Portage County Sheriff’s Office reopened the case last year, culminating with the identification of Kaziateck, a 36-year-old Warren resident, as the John Doe buried in Paris’ Hawley Cemetery more than three decades ago.
“We don’t have a lot of background on him,” Portage County Sheriff’s detective Trent Springer said. “We don’t know where he hung out. We don’t know who he hung out with. We don’t have a whole lot of that information and we’re trying to generate some leads to see if we can take this from a who is it, which we now know, and it’s become a ‘who did it’ and that’s what we want to find out now.”
In the meantime, plans are in place to finally give Kaziateck a proper headstone with his actual name on it.
“It always bothered me that we had a John Doe in our cemetery,” said Paris Township Trustee Ed Semec.
