FBI awards Escondido Police after NGI identification led to 1986 cold-case arrest

The Federal Bureau of Investigation presented its 2025 Biometric Identification Award to the Escondido Police Department in recognition of investigators’ use of the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system to identify a suspect in a 1986 homicide, Speaker 1 said.

The recognition highlights a decades-long reinvestigation that reunited forensic reanalysis with modern biometric tools. Speaker 3, a cold‑case investigator with the Escondido Police Department, said detectives reopened the file in about 2007 and reexamined evidence that previously produced no database matches. “So had it not been for NGI, this case would have never been solved,” Speaker 3 said.

According to the account given in the presentation, the victim — an Army veteran with limited mobility — was last seen alive on Nov. 12, 1986, and found by his caretaker the next morning; police arrived within eight minutes. Investigators recovered a small metal cash box (about $300), the linen closet where it had been stored, and a bent knife with the victim’s blood. A bloody palm print inside the apartment yielded two DNA profiles: one matching the victim and a second profile that investigators could not initially identify.

A series of forensic steps followed. Speaker 4, a former latent‑print specialist with the Escondido Police Department’s Forensic Services Unit, said she recaptured sharper images of latent prints using a new DCS camera station and first searched local systems without a hit. She said the department then submitted the images to NGI; the system returned 10 possible candidates, and she was able to identify a likely match to Nathan Mathis. “I was able to make an identification to mister Nathan Mathis,” Speaker 4 said.

Detectives coordinated with Fontana Police Department personnel and probation officers to surveil the identified suspect, Speaker 5 said. Investigators described an evidence‑collection technique that involved retrieving a water bottle handled by Mathis; the sample was sent to the San Diego County lab and produced a DNA hit. “There was a hit, on the DNA, and mister Mathis was arrested,” Speaker 5 said.

After Mathis’s arrest in 2018, the department obtained his major case prints and compared them to the bloody palm print; investigators said scars visible in post‑1986 prints were consistent with the injuries captured in the palm print. The case proceeded to a preliminary hearing and, according to the presentation, Mathis entered a plea to second‑degree murder, a charge the presenters described as carrying a 15‑to‑life sentence range.

The FBI presenter closed the segment by encouraging agencies to use NGI services and by providing the FBI website and an email for award submissions. The transcript does not specify the date of the award ceremony.

The award citation credited combined forensic reexamination and biometric database searching for producing investigative leads that led to an arrest and a subsequent plea; the Escondido Police Department was named the 2025 recipient.

Next step: The presentation provided contact information for NGI services and instructions for submitting nominations for the Biometric Identification Award.