Philadelphia Police Set To Reveal Identity of 'Boy in the Box' Found Dead in 1957

Mar. 15, 2025

Photo: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Philadelphia Police are set to announce the identity of a boy who was found dead and abandoned in the city in 1957.

The child, aged between 3 and 7 years old, has been known as “the Boy in the Box” ever since he was found naked and beaten on the side of a road in the city’s Fox Chase neighborhood.

Thanks to a breakthrough in DNA evidence, however, authorities have now been able to retrieve the boy’s birth certificate and will next weektell the world his name, sources confirmed to NBC10 on Wednesday.

“He was one of these throwaway, forgotten children,” Bill Fleisher of theVidocq Societytold the outlet about “the longest continuously investigated homicide in the history of the Philadelphia Police Department.”

The news follows an announcement last year that investigators were getting close to solving the case.

“There have been rapid developments as it pertains to that investigation,” Philadelphia Police Captain Jason Smith told NBC10. Since then the lost boy’s DNA has been traced to a “prominent family” in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, added the outlet.

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“We thought maybe he was a Hungarian kid who came over in ‘56 when they had the Hungarian Revolution,” Fleisher said Wednesday. “We had all these theories. Thought maybe he was in the military.”

Tragically, the unnamed child’s tombstone at Philadelphia’s Ivy Hill Cemetery currently reads, “America’s Unknown Child.”

PEOPLE has reached out to the Philadelphia Police Department for updates on the investigation.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

source: people.com