The People Who ID the Does

The job of identifying many of Los Angeles County’s unnamed dead falls to an understaffed division of the coroner’s department: the Identification and Notification Section.

This is where cases involving the department’s unclaimed and nameless dead end up, whether it’s for the few days it takes to locate the medical charts to corroborate the identity of an elderly woman who died alone in her apartment, the months it can take to find the far-away family of an undocumented worker hit by a car, or the years that thorny cases such as Jane Doe #59’s go unsolved.

Despite the section’s grim mission, its atmosphere of humanity and good humor is due largely to the efforts of Gilda Tolbert, 50, the sole investigator assigned to the identification side, and her husband, Doyle, 57, who notifies the next of kin when his wife finally identifies a Doe.

Gilda came to the coroner’s office in 1981 as a single mother of two who needed a good-paying job. She worked her way up from aide to investigator. Doyle Tolbert was a police officer in Los Angeles and Fullerton for 19 years before a back injury sidelined him in 1986. They married seven years ago.

The Tolberts direct a skeleton crew that includes one other full-time investigator who helps Doyle with family notifications, a clerk, a student intern and a couple of rotating investigators-in-training. If their small staff and windowless basement work space sometimes leave them unsure of the priority placed on their work, they understand their mission.

“Each one of these folders represents a human being who had hopes and aspirations,” Doyle Tolbert says, pointing to a stack of dogeared files on his desk. Gilda Tolbert, a stickler for details, studies every coupon, business card or phone number a Doe was carrying when he or she died. “If I have no concern for these cases, who will?” she says.

The work of sifting through the debris of other people’s lives can be rewarding. (Doyle Tolbert says they once uncovered the name of a young man found with nothing on him but a scrap of paper from a St. Louis tattoo parlor.) It also can be aggravating, depressing and thankless. Hospitals sometimes lose or throw away the clothes and wallets of Does brought into their emergency rooms. Neighbors and co-workers of Does who may be here illegally often refuse to talk because they are afraid of endangering their immigration status.

Except for when Doyle gets to report that the relative they haven’t seen for years left behind a substantial estate, people are rarely happy to hear from him. Michele Esparza, the student intern, keeps a more typical response taped to her desk: “I don’t want anything to do with that drunk.”