Body Mix-Up Is Only Start of Mexico Ordeal

Peering into the coffin for a farewell glance at her son, Urbano Mendoza’s mother gasped in a way that neighbors from her Mexican village took as deep maternal grief.

“This isn’t my son!” she cried, then fainted. And, though no one realized it at the time, she was right: In what would later be described as a “clerical error,” the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner-Medical Examiner had shipped the stricken mother the wrong man.

Her son was a stocky 29-year-old, gunned down tragically in a robbery; the body in the casket, it eventually was determined, was that of Michael James Mendoza, a slender, middle-aged Norwalk man who had overdosed on heroin. The mix-up, which has so far cost taxpayers $45,000 and prompted a lawsuit from one of the families involved, was another black eye for the coroner’s office, which handles hundreds of bodies without incident each year.

The mistake spawned a 58-day international saga, as well as considerable soul-searching in the department, which is still smarting from criticism made during the O.J. Simpson case and from revelations that it took money for corneas harvested from cadavers without family consent.

“I’ve been here for 25 years and I’ve never heard of anything worse than this--ever,” said Coroner Director Anthony T. Hernandez.

More broadly, however, the tale of the two Mendozas, as laid out in interviews and public records obtained by The Times, is one that also illuminates a world that has become familiar to thousands in this increasingly international metropolis: the Kafkaesque world of foreign--and domestic--bureaucracies.

And in the wake of this incident, no one knows that better now than two lowly bureaucrats from the coroner’s office, who braved tarantulas, vultures, gun-toting troops, an earthquake and a hard-line Mexican bureaucrat in their well-meaning quest to allow the Mendozas--both of them--to rest in peace.

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Urbano Mendoza, 29, died in October 1996, a victim of two gunshots fired during a Maywood robbery. His extended family hired a local funeral home to pick up his body from the coroner’s office downtown for the trip home to Colima, on the southwest coast of Mexico. It cost them $3,000.

But instead of wheeling out the 231-pound Urbano, Case 96-7655, an attendant returned from a refrigerated area with Case 96-7155: Michael James Mendoza, 186 pounds, who at 50 was found dead of a heroin overdose in an alley behind 24th Street.

No one followed policy and matched the paperwork before releasing the body--not even the shift supervisor, who was “preoccupied with a personal need to leave work as soon as possible,” according to a disciplinary letter obtained by The Times. It also disclosed that the supervisor had a hand in two other body mix-ups, including a 1994 case in which the wrong person was cremated.

Those three cases have been the only mix-ups committed among the thousands of deaths handled since 1990, coroner officials said.

In this case, Urbano Mendoza’s family buried the wrong man before the official mistake came to light. His grief-stricken mother convinced herself that her mind must have been playing tricks on her when the lid of the coffin was briefly lifted before the burial.

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As the Mendozas mourned their loss, coroner’s officials back in Los Angeles realized their mistake when they located relatives of Michael Mendoza. When workers went to retrieve his body to turn it over to the family, they found that it had been shipped to the other family in Mexico.

“We advised the families at that time that we . . . would be doing everything we could to correct the situation and make it right,” said Chief Coroner Investigator Craig Harvey, who oversees body releases. “And [we] extended, of course, our apologies for our error.”

Urbano’s family held a second funeral in December 1996, when the body arrived accompanied by the two coroner’s employees.

“The family related to us that they felt like [Urbano] had died two times, and the pain was very much hurtful,” one of the employees, Miriam Lopez, wrote in her log of the trip.

The department sent Lopez, its former purchasing officer, and Juan J. Jimenez, assistant chief of the coroner’s operations bureau, with $7,000 in traveler’s checks, Urbano’s corpse and orders to bring back the other body.

“I thought it was a 10-day deal, there and back,” Jimenez said.

An ambitious goal, considering that Mexican law forbids disturbing or moving a body for years after it is interred. Jimenez said they hoped to avoid the problem by pointing out that the law shouldn’t apply because Michael Mendoza had been an American citizen.

But immediately after they landed in Colima in early December, Lopez and Jimenez found themselves caught in the cross-fire between the local police department and the regional health office, which had the authority to approve the exhumation.

They were told to translate all their documents into Spanish and to write declarations. With Mexican officials demanding everything in the original--there were no copiers to be seen--Lopez spent many hours pecking away at a manual typewriter borrowed from the hotel.

Then there was the nature of the mission itself that caused people to gawk.

“People were kind of talking, like, real low when we were around and stuff,” said Lopez, who briefly left the coroner’s office after the Mendoza ordeal but has since returned to a marketing position that includes running the coroner’s gift shop.

But the biggest hitch came just three days into the assignment, when the Americans got off on the wrong foot with Francisco Alvarez, then head of the legal section of the secretary of health in Colima.

Sensing they were on the verge of success, the Americans had hired gravediggers to begin turning the earth the morning of a scheduled meeting with Alvarez. When he learned that they had gone ahead without permission, Alvarez chewed out the pair for proceeding with “no rights and no authority.”

“We looked at each other and I said, ‘I think this guy’s going to play hardball with us,’ ” recalled Jimenez.

And he did, according to the Americans. They said he announced that it would take him 72 hours--not counting the weekend--to process the request. He then limited the exhumation request to cover identification purposes only, not removal of the wrong body. He required an original letter co-signed by Michael Mendoza’s family in Norwalk. And he ordered the pair to write yet another narrative of the mix-up and their efforts to rectify it.

Alvarez denied that he was throwing administrative roadblocks at the Americans, who he said were “respectful up to a point” but wanted everything done in 24 hours.

“They demanded speed,” he said in a recent interview. “And I told them, it is not the authorities that are holding this up. It is the [regulations].

“What do I get out of having a cadaver here? Does he have bones of gold or what?”

The gravediggers had to refill the hole. Three days and four typed drafts later, the thoroughly frustrated Americans decided to pay a cold call on the American Consulate, a four-hour drive away in Guadalajara.

“In my years of being abroad in the foreign service, I’ve never seen an instance where a wrong body was shipped and buried,” said Danny Root, the U.S. consul general who has served 27 years in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Greece and Vietnam.

The consulate added another stop for the county employees, who found themselves shuttling documents between hotel stays in Guadalajara and Colima. In all, they made about 12 to 15 trips between the two Mexican cities, racking up 4,500 miles on their rental cars.

The consulate’s intervention helped, however, and the Americans finally received permission from Alvarez to tap into the Mendoza family plot to fingerprint the wrong body.

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It wasn’t what they wanted, but it was a start. The dig took place Dec. 12, 1996, under a circling audience of vultures. Jimenez finished the identification at dusk and emerged from the hole just as several large tarantulas converged from behind some rocks.

The county workers had the prints but not the body. Jimenez, for one, said he dreaded going back into the office without it when he returned to the United States for Christmas--one of seven round-trip plane flights made by Lopez and Jimenez during the ordeal.

“The employees would say, ‘You’re back and there’s no body?’ ” he said.

Things didn’t look any more promising when the two returned to Mexico in January 1997 to face off again with Alvarez, who sent the case up the line to federal officials in Mexico City. Further delay: eight to 10 days.

There was nothing to do but wait. And wait. Lopez took a vacation break back in the States; Jimenez stayed behind and was caught in a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that rocked his Guadalajara hotel, where he had a room on the 22nd floor. Then, on the way back to Colima, he was pulled over by guards looking for sympathizers of the Chiapas revolution.

Finally, the day came to remove the body. It was Jan. 28, 1997--58 days since the coroner’s office first dispatched the employees and more than three months after the original mix-up.

Officials of the health department, the Mexican coroner’s office, the mayor and local police chief showed up for the occasion.

“A historian interviewed both of us because they said this was . . . an unprecedented case that occurred in the history of Mexico, an error like this,” Jimenez said.

After workers punched through the concrete vault, the remains of Michael Mendoza were put into a hearse and sent back to Guadalajara for a mortuary touch-up before the final plane ride home.

But befitting the misbegotten effort, even this wouldn’t be easy. As they followed the hearse, the rental car that Lopez and Jimenez were driving sputtered to a stop in the desert outside Guadalajara. They were stranded.

A relief car rescued them three hours later, and the next day they escorted the homebound body to the shipping department of American Airlines.

“I had my hand on the coffin,” said Jimenez. “Watched it being loaded on the plane. And the moment that plane took off, I got on the phone and I said, ‘We’re home free!’ ”

Not quite.

Two months later, on a pleasure trip to visit a relative near Colima, Lopez and her boyfriend took a drive to Urbano’s grave “just to make sure everything was OK.”

It wasn’t. Lopez saw that the gravediggers never filled the hole.

Lopez said she became furious and demanded action from a cemetery official.

Has the grave finally been closed, giving Urbano Mendoza his much-deserved rest?

Lopez isn’t sure. “I’m hoping it was,” she said.

Times staff writer Anne-Marie O’Connor contributed to this story from San Diego.