TikToker's shock after her DNA ancestry kit led to her grandma being arrested in dead baby cold case
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The influencer’s kit led to a nearly 30-year-old cold case being solved, but it now means her grandma may face a life sentence in prison.
TikTok user Jenna Rose recently went viral on the social media platform after she explained how the results of her Ancestry DNA kit led to her absent grandmother’s arrest.
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Hide AdShe began her video, which has 16 million views on the platform, by explaining that she “never met [her] grandmother” and “didn’t even know her name” until she was about 15. She then said that her grandma was a suspect in an unsolved “Baby Garnet” case which involved the death of a baby.
It was in June 1997 that the Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office and Michigan State Police opened an investigation after “the remains of a deceased infant were discovered in a campground pit toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground in the Upper Peninsula’s Hudson Township,” according to the Michigan Department of Attorney General.
At the time, an autopsy determined the “decedent to have been a ‘term or near-term infant’ of a gestational age of 36-42 weeks.”


The baby became known as “Baby Garnet”, but the case went unsolved for almost 30 years. Then, in May this year, Nancy Ann Gerwatoski was charged with one count each of open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual.
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Hide AdShe’s due to go on to trial for the cold case murder, and may be sent to jail for life if she’s found guilty.
In her TikTok video, Rose said that it was her ancestry DNA kit, which she took two years ago, which was the catalyst to the development in the case.
She said that a year after she got her ancestry results back, she received a phone call from a police officer in Michigan who told her she had a connection to Baby Garnet. “[He] was like, ‘I just want to let you know I re-opened a cold case from like 25 years ago... and your DNA is a direct match to the victim of this case.”
It was then revealed to her, that after putting her DND on a worldwide database, it was found that her DNA came back “as a distant relative” to someone involved in the Baby Garnet case. It was when her mum also agreed to give her DNA for testing, Rose then found out that her grandmother was a suspect.
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Hide AdShe explained: “[They] ended up finding out that it’s not a distant relative to my mum, but a direct relative. And the only other people it could have been was my mum’s mother. They kind of started doing their own investigation and figured out that’s who it was. So we were mind blown.”
Rose went on: “Mind you, I’ve never met this woman before. She is literally the f***ing person that they’ve been looking for for 25 years. And it’s all because of a f***ing Ancestry DNA kit.”
According to local Michigan news outlet Wood TV, Nancy Ann Gerwatowski was arrested in July 2022 and placed in the Mackinac County Jail on an open murder warrant as the suspect in the 1997 Baby Garnet case.
Her arrest came after investigative efforts were renewed in 2017, when a Michigan State Police detective sargent “initiated familial genetic genealogical tracing with the assistance of a private laboratory and the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” who by this time had possessed the skeletal remains of Baby Garnet, as noted by the state of Michigan.
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Hide Ad“A lab received remains to test in 2020, and in 2022 a DNA profile was developed and returned indicating a specific familial lineage,” the state reported.
These results led investigators to Nancy Gerwatowski, who was then living in Wyoming. The Michigan attorney general’s office stated that additional DNA testing of Gerwatowski obtained through a search warrant had confirmed her parentage to Baby Garnet.