Missing Boy’s Body Identified at Morgue

A body that lay unclaimed in a coroner’s vault for nearly two months--one that morgue personnel had listed as the remains of a 30-year-old man--was discovered Monday to be a 13-year-old developmentally disabled boy whose family had been frantic over his puzzling disappearance.

Taj Cooper, police learned, had not run away from home or been taken away against his will. He had been hit by a car, just a few blocks from his grandmother’s apartment south of Koreatown on Oct. 1--the same day he left, saying he was going to take out the trash.

The boy, a native of Liberia whose vacation in this country to visit family had extended into a four-year stay, died the next day at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Coroner’s spokesman Bob Dambacher said facial hair and other characteristics of the boy’s body apparently led morgue personnel to believe he could have been as old as 30.

Taj’s grandmother, Maria Cooper, and other family members described him as about 5 feet 3, weighing little more than 100 pounds, with a line of peach fuzz across his upper lip.

Police said the body, which had no identification papers on it, was identified through fingerprints.

As she sat in her apartment Monday night, Maria Cooper’s emotions alternated between despair and a slender thread of hope.

“Maybe it isn’t him,” she said, at one point. “I thought he had on blue jeans when he left, but the hospital said the dead person had on black denims. Maybe it isn’t him.”

For as long as Taj had been gone and as recently as a few days ago, she said, there had been reports of sightings at various places around the city. For that reason, she said, she could not blame police for nurturing the suspicion that he was intentionally staying away from home.

At the last sighting, officers had checked out a report that the boy had been seen on 110th Street, she said.

That report and all the others, officers know now, were false.

Detective L. J. Jones of the Wilshire Division juvenile unit said investigators learned Monday morning that the boy had been an accident victim when the body’s fingerprints were matched with a set of the boy’s.

Traffic Officer Jim Hamilton said the youth was hit by a car as he walked across Western Avenue. The driver told police she had been driving beside a truck when it made a sudden stop. She realized too late, she said, that the truck had halted for a pedestrian, and her car struck the boy.

Maria Cooper said Taj’s parents, both of whom are in Liberia, had not yet been informed of their son’s death.

The boy’s father, who had been living in the United States, had returned to Liberia in August after the death of his own father and was trapped there by the West African country’s civil war.

His plan, the grandmother said, was to come back and get her and Taj, as soon as it was safe, and take them back to Africa to live.