GALVESTON, Texas - Lois Gibson says she has been waiting 8 months to “breathe.”
Gibson, who has been a forensic sketch artist with the Houston Police Department for 36 years, doesn’t let herself get emotional until the person in her sketch is identified. In this case, that person was a 4-year-old boy who reminded her of her own grandson.
The child has been identified as Jayden Alexander Lopez.
She first sketched Jayden, who police referred to as “Little Jacob,” back in October and takes note of the resemblance to Jayden.
“My sketch is pretty close,” Gibson said.
She is gratified the child has been identified.
“It gives you a relief. I finally figured out that I don’t let myself cry when it’s unidentified, so for 8 months, I had to bare it, and just suck it up and say to myself, ‘You may go the rest of your life and never know. You may never know the rest of your life.'"
Gibson made the sketch from police photographs of the little boy taken on the Galveston beach where his body was discovered.
“He was beautiful. He was beautiful. It looked like he just died, and I don’t believe he had been in the water for one second,” Gibson said.
Gibson is an author, teacher and an expert on facial reconstruction from skeletal remains. She sketched the little girl known as “Baby Grace” more than a decade ago. The 2-year-old was found in Galveston Bay and was positively identified by an out-of-state family member within days of the sketch being released.
“She was severely decomposed, which took me down, because she looked like my daughter as a baby," Gibson said.
Gibson calls her work the hardest job on the planet, but one that is rewarding when it leads to the identification of a victim or suspect and brings a criminal to justice. Her sketch is often the only lead for investigators at first.
“If they don’t know the name of a murdered baby, they got nothing, because they haven’t been in the Army, there’s no fingerprints, they don’t have a driver’s license in their diaper. They have nothing, but if the sketch can give them a name, now, they can solve the case," Gibson said.