Benjaman Kyle

On August 31, 2004, at 5:00a.m., a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found Powell unconscious, naked, and sunburned behind a dumpster of the restaurant. He had three impressions in his skull that appeared to have been caused by blunt force trauma; he also had red ant bites on his body. Employees called emergency services, who took him to St. Joseph's/Candler Hospital in Savannah. He had no identity document and was recorded in hospital records as "Burger King Doe" or "B.K. Doe". There were no reports of stolen vehicles in the area and local restaurants and hotels had not encountered any individuals matching Powell's description. Powell believed he was passing through Richmond Hill, either on U.S. Route 17 or Interstate 95 in late August 2004. He may also have been on the road because of Hurricane Charley, which had hit earlier that month. After being released from the hospital, Powell spent several years between the Grace House men's shelter and hospitals. In 2007, while at The J.C. Lewis Health Care Center, he met a nurse who inquired about his past. Georgia Legal Services was unable to obtain Powell's medical records because Memorial Health requested an $800 fee. A friend contacted Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston for help with the case. To help with Powell's identification, Kingston's office sent DNA samples to the FBI's National Criminal Justice Information Services Division in West Virginia. In March 2011, Powell was approached by Florida State University's College of Motion Picture Arts graduate student John Wikstrom. Powell moved to Jacksonville, Florida, traveling on foot, in order to be filmed for a documentary. In 2011, with help from Florida State Representative Mike Weinstein, Powell obtained a legal, government-issued Florida Legacy ID. Powell's story appeared in a report on News4Jax, which caught the attention of a local restaurateur, who subsequently employed Powell as a dishwasher. , he lived in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, in a 5-by-8-foot, air-conditioned shack provided by a benefactor. Several online petitions were created asking lawmakers to grant Powell a new Social Security number. In 2012, an online petition was created on the We the People petitioning system on whitehouse.gov, but when its deadline expired on December 25, it had received only two-thirds of the number of signatures required to receive an official response. In February 2015, forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick reported that Powell had cut off all contact with her just as she felt she was nearing a breakthrough. ==Search for identity==

There were a number of major efforts to identify "Benjaman Kyle" by matching his fingerprints or DNA with that stored in various databases. These efforts included: • Fingerprint comparison to the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database of offenders • Fingerprint comparison to databases of military personnel and government workers • A Y-DNA test through the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth, Texas • Searches on Y-DNA online databases such as Ybase.org, Ysearch.org, usystrdatabase.org, smgf.org, and DNAAncestry.com • Searches on mtDNA online databases such as mitosearch.org, EMPOP.org, and smgf.org • Postings with missing persons networks In July 2009, a search was made by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs for Powell's Vietnam draft registration, based on his birthdate and his physical characteristics. Newspaper articles were published in the Boulder Daily Camera and the Denver Post in July 2009. Based on Powell's memories of the University of Colorado Boulder campus, it was hoped at the time that someone would respond to the articles to identify him. Colleen Fitzpatrick attempted to create a family tree for Powell; based on DNA tests, cousins were identified from the western Carolinas who collaborated with her to try to determine his identity. Fitzpatrick's efforts had not yet pinpointed his exact identity when he cut off communication with her. ==Biography/memories==

Powell remembered that he was born 10 years before Michael Jackson and on the same day, giving him a possible birth date of August 29, 1948. Genetic testing suggested that he may have had the surname Powell or Davidson or have relatives with these names. This placed Powell in Colorado in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Powell reported having memories of the controversy surrounding the construction of mass transit in Denver, at a time when the city still had no financing to proceed. Although the RTD Bus & Light Rail system in Denver went into operation in 1994, public debate over the construction of the system dates back to about 1980, consistent with the time period of the other memories that Powell has of Denver and Boulder. More specific memories of Boulder placed Powell there between 1976 and 1983. Powell had nearly no memory of his life after the 1980s, including how he ended up in Georgia. One event he does remember is reading about the September 11 attacks. Many of his memories he cannot describe in words and are at the tip of his tongue. ==Identification==

On September 16, 2015, Powell announced on his Facebook page that his identity had been established by a team of adoption researchers led by CeCe Moore. IDignity also assisted in establishing Powell's identification. On November 21, 2016, Benjaman Kyle's true identity was revealed to be William Burgess Powell. He was born on August 29, 1948, in Lafayette, Indiana, and was raised there. In 1976, he had cut ties with his family and abandoned his possessions, including his car and the trailer where he had been living. His family filed a missing persons report at the time, and police found he had moved to Boulder, Colorado on a whim with a coworker. His birth date turned out to be one of the details about his previous life that he had remembered correctly. A reporter found some Social Security records of him working in various jobs until 1983, after which no records could be found for the remaining period of more than 20 years before his discovery in 2004. ==Media coverage==

Powell appeared on the Dr. Phil show on the October 16, 2008, episode "Who am I". Dr. Phil McGraw paid for Powell to seek a professional hypnotist in an effort to help him recover lost memories. He also appeared on local television networks across the country. Powell says he has been met with skepticism about the case. ==See also==