Bizarre Death Baffles Police and Torments Youth’s Family

More than four months after his lifeless body was found on a sidewalk a few blocks from his Long Beach home, the mystery of how 17-year-old Jamaal Horton met his demise has only deepened. But his death has had a profound impact.

The popular Jordan High School athlete, whose body lay in the county morgue unidentified for nearly a month, has left a painful legacy for family and friends. But the Long Beach Police Department and the county coroner’s office have vowed to improve how they handle situations like Horton’s in the future.

The case has pointed out fundamental flaws in California’s system of tracing missing persons and matching names with unidentified bodies, local authorities said. The state collects such data, but there are no regional repositories of information from such cases that agencies can tap into quickly. Nor are there any standardized procedures for handling such circumstances. In Southern California, 80 agencies may have 80 different ways of doing business.

“Based on the Horton case and previous instances, there needs to be a critical look at how missing person reports are handled and creation of a system that funnels information to where it needs to be,” said Craig Harvey, chief of operations for the coroner’s office.

The problems are so persistent that state officials have recently discussed ways to improve methods of identifying bodies. One idea was to require that blood relatives who file missing person reports provide a DNA sample to compare with those taken from unidentified bodies.

It is unknown what difference such a requirement would have made in the Horton case. The delay in identifying him caused immeasurable pain to his relatives, and they have been frustrated in their attempts to find out why he died.

“Everyone feels so helpless,” said Jimmie Horton, Jamaal’s father. “We are learning that you can’t have any expectations of people.”

Authorities say they are baffled by the case and have few leads to pursue. Except for a small cut over his right eye and a scrape on his right shoulder, there were no obvious signs of trauma on Horton’s body.

Long-awaited autopsy results, released earlier this month, only added to the riddle: The coroner was able to determine why Horton died--sickling of the blood cells brought on by asphyxia--but not what caused the asphyxia.

“Drowning, smothering, both compression and placement of a bag over the head” could not be ruled out, and the case should be investigated as a homicide “until proven otherwise,” Deputy Medical Examiner Juan M. Carrillo concluded.

Coroner’s officials said that such a finding is rare and that the cause of death is left undetermined in only a small percentage of the thousands of cases they handle a year.

But the Horton case has puzzled nearly everyone involved from the start and has been beset with miscommunications.

When Horton’s body was found on the night of July 1 near his Orange Avenue home, he was carrying no identification and his fingerprints were not on file with county, state or federal law enforcement agencies.

How Identification Problem Unfolded

His parents thought he had gone out of town with friends and did not file a missing person report until July 6. Long Beach police detectives said they had checked their logs of missing person reports only a few hours before the Hortons filed theirs. Police and coroner’s officials then failed to link the body that lay in the morgue with the Hortons’ missing son, and Jamaal was known only as John Doe No. 70 for nearly a month.

Finally, the Long Beach Press-Telegram ran an article with a description of Horton on July 29, and his frantic family recognized him.

“There were just a series of unfortunate instances in this case, and we’re sorry the family has had to go through this,” said Officer Jana Blair, Long Beach police spokeswoman. “We are going to do everything we can to keep something like this from happening again.”

One of the first miscues was an inaccurate estimation of Jamaal Horton’s age. Long Beach police thought he might have been in his early 20s, and different units in the department handle adults and juveniles. When the Hortons filed their report about a lost 17-year-old, it might have initially been overlooked by detectives who had the body of an unidentified, well-built young man on their hands.

Blair said the department is implementing a new computer system that will allow detectives with limited information to cross-check adult and juvenile cases.

Progress was also hampered when the lead detective went on vacation, leaving the case with only one investigator. Although the Horton file was never idle, Blair said, from now on cases will always have detectives assigned to cover for vacationing colleagues.

Coroner’s officials said the Horton case has reinforced plans to implement a more proactive system of taking missing person reports and funneling information to a unit that specializes in identifying bodies.

Before, the coroner’s office would take phoned-in requests to check on bodies, but it now requires law enforcement to fax in a report so there will be a hard copy of information with which to cross-check bodies in the morgue, Harvey said.

Case Is Only the Latest Such Incident

Additionally, the office is installing a new computer system that will allow the input of photographs with case files and a sophisticated new scanning system that will allow electronic transmission of fingerprints directly to law enforcement agencies, rather than the old method of hand-carrying them or relying on a blurry facsimile.

The Horton case is only the latest painful incident of its kind in Los Angeles County, Harvey said.

In a 1989 case, a young man was struck by a train in an unincorporated area patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department, while a missing person report was filed with the LAPD, causing confusion and delay in identifying the body.

The coroner’s identification unit has only one investigator and a shared clerk, Harvey said. The department handles more than 300 unidentified bodies each year.

Still, only a handful remain nameless for more than a few months. With those, the department can check for fingerprints or dental records or perhaps go back to the area where the body was found for an identification. If there are no matches and no clues from neighbors, however, authorities must hope someone files a report.

Long Beach police said it is equally rare for them to have a body unidentified for more than a few days. Though they now have a name for their victim, the Horton case is especially challenging, Blair said.

“It’s more difficult to understand this case in particular because of the autopsy results and the fact that, as detectives, we don’t even know if it is a murder,” she said. “That in itself makes it more of a challenge. You find that you personally want to know what happened to this individual, especially because he’s a young kid who had a future.”

The lead investigator, Det. Steve Smith, declined to discuss the case.

Horton was an A student and promising football player who had letters of interest from the athletic departments of several prominent universities. The family believes he was slain and is not satisfied the police are doing all they can.

“I don’t get the sense that people are out there working for me to find out what happened to my son,” said Jimmie Horton. “My son’s death can be solved; I believe that.”

Horton said he has provided detectives with the names of several of his son’s friends, including two who are believed to have been with him on his last afternoon. Horton has also consulted a specialist in the sickle cell trait who told him that the autopsy finding of intravascular sickling was a benign condition that would probably not have killed Jamaal by itself.

“The detectives seem to want to insist on ignoring the 99% chance he was murdered and instead look at the 1% chance he fell dead,” Horton said.

Long Beach authorities would not reveal who, if anyone, has been interviewed about the death but say the case remains open.

Horton said he believes that his neighborhood may be cursed. Since Jamaal’s death, three other young people from the area have died violently. He knew them all and had coached their Pop Warner football teams. He told his wife, Beverly, that he was drawn to these accounts of tragedy and could not avoid reading them.

“We’re feeling really bad,” Horton said, “but a lot of other people long before us have suffered just as badly.”