A Body Lost in Bureaucracy : Death: Couple’s son had been in the morgue for a month before they found out. Delay in identification was caused by bad timing, missed opportunities and inaction by government agencies.

Jimmie Horton was lying in bed when he saw a flash of red streak past his window and around a corner.

There seemed to be more red flashes piercing the July 1 night sky--and close by.

But Horton paid no attention. He lay there thinking about the argument he had had less than an hour before with his son, 17-year-old Jamaal. The boy was supposed to clean the bathroom, but instead he had left to hang out with friends in the neighborhood.

Those red flashes would come to haunt the elder Horton when he learned, many days later, that the lights were from Long Beach police cruisers and paramedics. They had assembled on a corner nearby after the discovery of a body: young, black and male.

In the early morning hours of July 2, the body of the young man was in the coroner’s office, where it remained for a month as an unidentified corpse--John Doe No. 70--until Jimmie Horton and his wife, after frantic weeks of searching, found him there.

His mysterious death and the Hortons’ frustrating attempts to learn what happened to their son, a parent’s worst nightmare, is a story of bureaucratic inaction and missed opportunities. The saga has led the Long Beach Police Department to examine how it handles missing person cases and to offer an apology to the family.

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Jamaal had stayed away all night July 1 and that was uncharacteristic.

The next day, Horton asked neighbors if they knew where his son was. The neighbors thought he had gone to Moreno Valley to stay with buddies. His parents were not especially concerned. Jamaal, they felt, was responsible and he had stayed with friends before. But a few days later, on July 6, when Jamaal’s friends returned to Long Beach from Moreno Valley, he was not with them. He had not accompanied them.

That night, Beverly Horton called the Long Beach Police Department and filed a missing person report.

She and her husband called every emergency room they could think of, without success.

He should not have been hard to identify.

Jamaal was almost 6 feet 2, a promising student who had been listed in the who’s who of American high schoolers. He was a top choice to become the starting quarterback at Jordan High School this fall and had letters of interest from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, among others.

He had grown up in a north Long Beach neighborhood, a working-class area just south of the Artesia Freeway dotted with older apartment buildings and unpretentious, single-family homes.

Everyone seemed to know Jamaal. He was a good-looking kid who had been a standout pitcher and first baseman in youth baseball. He was the boy the grocer on the corner remembered because he was so polite and easygoing. He was a kid in a rough neighborhood who had never been fingerprinted, never taken a ride in a squad car.

When he ran out into the chilling night just after 8:30 p.m., he had pulled on a Gap jacket over his blue California Angels T-shirt. He was wearing three pairs of gym shorts, including a pair with the logo of his Jordan High School Panthers on it.

He walked across the parking lot of the auto shop next to his apartment building, probably heading for a friend’s place just across Orange Avenue. That was the last time anyone reported seeing him alive.

That night, an elderly couple turned onto Harding Street and spotted the form of a young man lying on the sidewalk in this quiet residential area. By the time neighbors had gathered, police had cordoned off the scene. No one who knew Jamaal got a good look at the body under the myrtle tree.

Los Angeles County coroner’s investigators were notified about 11:30 p.m. and arrived on Harding Street soon after. Jamaal, lying on his back with no obvious wounds, had been pronounced dead by Long Beach paramedics.

He was carrying no money or identification when he was transported to the morgue. Nor were there tattoos or other distinguishing marks. His fingerprints were sent to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the state Department of Justice and the FBI. But no matches were found.

In any given year, the coroner has as many as 300 cases in which a body is not initially identified. They are recorded as John or Jane Doe. Jamaal was the 70th unidentified male at that point.

The autopsy revealed little of the fate that had befallen him. There were scratches on his head, but it could not be determined whether they were the result of a fall or of deliberate blows. There was no evidence of disease or sickness.

A July 7 call by the coroner’s office to the missing persons’ unit at the Long Beach Police Department yielded no matches, according to coroner’s notes. It would be the first missed opportunity.

Alhough the Hortons had filed a report with Long Beach police on July 6, it did not appear in the computerized national index until July 9, said coroner’s operations chief Craig Harvey. Alhough the Hortons’ report was on file with the police, the parents were told there was no record of such a person.

Other inquiries to the Long Beach police would be made by the Hortons and the coroner without success.

On July 7, 8 and 11, Jimmie Horton specifically remembers calling Long Beach police detectives with a description of his son and a question: Have you picked up any young men like that? He said the response was always blase, as if the detectives had not checked since the last time he asked.

Neighbors close to the spot where Jamaal was found told the Hortons that the police never knocked on their doors. So Beverly and Jimmie went from home to home in the neighborhood themselves, looking for a clue.

In the parking lot of the corner minimarket a few days after Jamaal disappeared, Jimmie met a cop and asked about the police activity around the block on the night of July 1. If it had been your son, he says the officer told him, you would have known already.

“I don’t blame the police for my son’s death, but we wish they had looked at this unidentified young black male as someone’s son rather than just another gangbanger,” Jimmie said. “If they’d knocked on a few doors or checked at the corner grocery, someone would have recognized Jamaal.”

Police Thought the Young Man Was Older

One problem may have been an inaccurate estimate of Jamaal’s age. He had turned 17 in May, yet police and coroner’s investigators thought he might have been in his early 20s. No one connected the Hortons’ missing son with the body in the morgue.

Long Beach police had put out a news release the night they picked up the body on July 1. However, no news agencies ran an article. Deputy Chief Anthony Batts said detectives checked missing person files the first five days. Then the lead detective went on vacation. He would not return until July 27. In the intervening time, not much of anything seems to have been done about the case.

Coroner’s notes indicate that someone from the Long Beach missing person’s unit came by the office July 16 to look at photos of Jamaal, although no one at the Police Department can remember the visit.

A school district administrator would later liken it to a puzzle. Everyone had a few pieces, but no one seemed to be able to put them together.

The Jordan High gym shorts fit in somewhere. Jamaal’s clothing had been removed by an autopsy technician before the labels could be observed, according to coroner’s notes. Still, there were photos of his clothing, including his gym shorts. Harvey said the shorts wouldn’t necessarily mean that Jamaal was a student at Jordan, especially because the body was believed to be at least 20. But, with no other leads to go on, yes, Harvey concedes, perhaps a call to Jordan High should have been made.

They had not called in a forensic anthropologist, who could have provided a more precise determination of age, or a dental expert to chart his teeth. The procedures involve going back into the body and are a last resort, said Harvey of the coroner’s office.

In similar cases, the coroner might also have had an artist sketch Jamaal and publicize the drawing in the media. No such effort was made. Harvey said his office was constrained because the death was being investigated as a possible homicide.

Deputy Chief Batts said homicide detectives were investigating because the autopsy was inconclusive. He said there is no evidence at this time of foul play.

The news release finally appeared in the Long Beach Press-Telegram on July 29.

A weary Jimmie Horton was reading the paper and ran across the article. Until that moment, the Hortons still held out hope they would see their son would walk through the door.

Family’s Disbelief Turns to Anger

Hundreds crowded into Good Faith Missionary Baptist Church on Aug. 7 for Jamaal’s funeral. The Hortons were surprised because they didn’t know many of them. But all had met Jamaal in one way or another. They were moved by the adults who talked about their son. He was always respectful; even the parents of the girlfriends he dated praised him, saying he knew when it was time to leave. It meant a lot to the Hortons to know Jamaal represented the family so well.

But their stunned disbelief that their son is gone has turned to anger, and for Jimmie Horton it’s become an obsession with discovering what befell Jamaal. Because he was left unidentified so long, his body was in no condition to be viewed. The family, including his sister, Sheena, 15, and brother, LaVar, 21, did not get to see him before he was buried.

Beverly Horton works two jobs, as a customer relations agent and as a part-time clerk at a hardware and garden supply store.

Jimmie Horton does part-time coaching at Jordan High and attends Long Beach City College, studying business computers. They are a struggling black family, and they wonder if that affected the investigation of their son’s death. Police asked them a lot of questions about gang ties, although there was no evidence that Jamaal had ever been involved, they said.

To them it seems as if police found Jamaal’s body, put the case file on a shelf and forgot about it.

No one knows why or how he died. Coroner’s investigators are waiting for toxicology reports and tests of tissue samples.

Jamaal’s case, however, has prompted the Long Beach police to tighten procedures.

“The critical question is, if this were my child, would I accept the efforts that were made. I think we failed in that count,” said Batts. “I’m sorry for the trauma this family has suffered.”