Graveside With John Doe

He was buried as he was found--alone and nameless and, near as anyone can tell, very far from home.

When his border-crossing journey reached its terminus on a sunny November morning, it was in a bare, pressed-wood box with plastic handles and a coroner’s case number scrawled on the lid. Three dour gravediggers and a soft-spoken fellow from the funeral home lowered the coffin into the slick Imperial County clay, then did the same with the remains of a woman, also unidentified.

The two bodies brought to 133 the number of undocumented immigrants buried in this paupers graveyard, their graves marked by plain concrete loaves labeled “John Doe” or “Jane Doe.”

Imperial County, with its incongruous mix of desert and treacherous irrigation channels, has become the deadliest spot on the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants sneaking north. The immigrant fatalities, on the rise in recent years along with the region’s popularity as a crossing corridor, have generated a miniature death industry. The cases place growing demands on the county coroner, the Brawley funeral home that serves as morgue, Mexican consular officials who must hunt for relatives, and the workers who tend the potter’s field in rural Holtville.

Imperial County coroner officials had to buy a four-wheel-drive pickup truck to get to the multiplying number of bodies turning up in distant desert recesses. They huff their way through steep canyons, carrying corpses in temperatures that in summer routinely hit 110 degrees.

At the Brawley funeral home, shelves in the refrigerated storage room at times brim with canary-yellow body bags holding the remains of anonymous immigrants. The extra cases have county officials talking about the need for their own morgue.

And one harried Mexican consular official in Calexico spends some months doing nothing but fielding reports of missing migrants and trying to identify the dead.

There often is little more to go on than a scrap of paper or the style of underwear found on the bodies.

No successful leads emerged in the case of the recently buried John Doe. His ragged remains were found in late August along a desolate, creosote-specked wash where he appeared to have succumbed to the heat and, after death, to the work of scavenging coyotes.

His was the fourth migrant case in an eight-day stretch. That was not an exceptionally deadly period. But it provided a window into the peculiar circumstances of death in this overlooked corner of the state. Here, 89 migrants last year fell short in their treks, far from home and out of view even to the residents of this sun-faded farm belt.

Desert Does Not Forgive

It’s 1 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon when the call comes to coroner’s office supervisor Rick Macken, an affable former cop with the open, ruddy face of a TV country doctor. Mechanics tending a power-generation station on the All-American Canal about 35 miles east of El Centro have come upon a dead man in the water.

Macken peels open a convenience-store sandwich and speeds east on Interstate 8. The farmland around El Centro gives way to unforgiving desert. The heat outside is punishing. Inside the coroner’s van, the air conditioner is cranked high. Macken gently explains what to expect when the body is pulled out. It won’t be pretty. On the sun visor above his forehead is a sticker that says, “I See Dead People.”

The canal, a man-made river about 175 feet wide, is the life-giving artery of the Imperial Valley. “Food grows where water flows,” a highway sign proclaims. The canal brings water from the Colorado River, nourishing a $1-billion farm industry amid parched surroundings. With a placid surface disguising fierce currents, it also explains how it is possible to drown in a desert, as this man has.

Immigrant smugglers use cheap rafts to get groups across the water, which parallels the international boundary so closely in some stretches that it serves as the unofficial divide. The rafts, overloaded, are unstable and capsize. Sometimes migrants just fall out. The canal’s waters move fast. Even veteran divers say the swirling currents below will beat you like eggs in a bowl.

The victim floats, face down, in an eddy at the base of the power station. Keith Roussel, a mechanic for the Imperial Irrigation District, which manages the vast network of canals and ditches, watches as two sheriff’s deputies try to recover the body using a pole and rope loop. Roussel says he’s seen 20 to 30 drownings in these waters in two years, almost all of them immigrants. “It makes you sick, really,” he says, looking away.

The deputies hoist the body with a mechanical lift that is used to clear branches and debris. Macken examines the man, whose face, grotesquely inflated by decomposition, has gone the color of lead. He wears two wool shirts, black pants, dingy tube socks and church shoes. A belt buckle, gold, bears the initial “L.”

Now comes the hard part: figuring out who the man is and where he came from. It’s not easy. Many migrants carry no identification. That’s so they can offer an alias if arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol. It’s a tactic of dubious worth, since fingerprints are taken electronically and entered into a federal database.

Macken says he and his two deputy coroners do everything possible--in concert with the Mexican Consulate--to make an identification. “Our job,” Macken says, “is to speak for the dead.”

He goes through the man’s soggy pockets. A slip of paper, bearing telephone numbers for Tijuana and Los Angeles, is wadded inside a plastic bag. A wallet has just two items: a Mexican factory ID card for a young woman--perhaps the man’s wife or girlfriend--and a faded thumbnail photo of an older woman. His mother, maybe? There is nothing else.

The body is loaded into the van for the ride to Frye Chapel and Mortuary, the funeral home that receives the coroner cases for storage and autopsy.

There have been so many migrant deaths lately that the funeral home’s octogenarian owner, Francis Frye, grumbles he may give up the county contract. He’s had to buy special sealed storage tanks to keep the stench of decomposition from wafting through his funeral home. The migrant victims are kept in the cooler for weeks pending identification, or until they are buried in the paupers graveyard.

“The last three years have been miserable,” Frye says.

Macken will work the telephone numbers listed on the scrap of paper and ask the consulate to track down the woman on the ID card. For now the dead man, who is placed in one of the tanks, is another John Doe.

Over the next few days, the telephone numbers prove a bust, and the autopsy yields only an obvious answer: The man drowned.

During his autopsy, Macken removes the fingertips in case he needs fingerprints. The tips slide off in neat sheaths. The investigators make prints by slipping the tiny flesh sleeves over their own gloved fingers. But fingerprints are not always helpful in Mexico, because there is no centralized databank. The availability of dental records is likewise spotty.

In this case, Macken will rely on Francisco Torres, a staffer at the local Mexican Consulate.

When he is not trying to match the deceased with missing-persons reports, Torres, good-natured and cautious, is arranging to repatriate a body or greeting the grieving relatives who come to take custody.

The previous week, he had five bodies from four Mexican states. Of the dozens dead since January, more than a third were unidentified. He’s consoled relatives and cautioned some against opening the coffin to confirm their loved one is inside. But many cannot stop themselves. “It’s a bitter drink, but they need to know,” Torres says with resignation.

Torres succeeds in locating the woman on the ID card. She lives in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso. She is too poor to travel to California to identify the body. Instead, she faxes to the consulate a copy of the man’s driver’s license. Macken relays, by e-mail, photographs of the belt buckle, shoes and shirt. The driver’s license offers poor fingerprints. But the woman is certain about the clothing. It belongs to her husband, a 25-year-old auto worker. His name was Quirino Lara Primo.

Soon, Winter’s Turn at Death

From its sun-bleached surface, the huge desert covering western Imperial County appears flat and featureless, but it is coursed by deep sand washes and sharp ribs of stony gravel. Dotted with ocotillo and creosote, the floor surrenders sharply to the boulder-studded mountains that march toward San Diego, 75 miles to the west. In winter, those mountains become snowy and frigid, a death trap for hiking immigrants. For now, though, it is the desert’s turn.

On this afternoon, Border Patrol agents near tiny Ocotillo have come across an undocumented man, alive but lapsing into unconsciousness along Interstate 8. Agents backtracked to find his companions, a man and woman, dead in a sizzling expanse half a mile off the highway.

The spot, about 10 miles from the border, has been patrolled more intensively due to the more frequent crossings and because migrants often have no idea of the perils they confront. Most of Imperial County’s migrant victims die in the desert, and this is the worst section.

Gary Hayes, a wisecracking former cop who has worked as a coroner for a year and a half, guns the four-wheel-drive pickup over soft sand and crumbling rises. The coroner’s investigators used to have to wait for Border Patrol agents to take them into isolated areas, or bring the bodies out themselves.

Hayes has a partner on the call, sheriff’s Deputy Ida Din, who will take photographs. She jerks back and forth in her seat as Hayes hammers over the rough ground. His Gatorade spills. Pens and other items fly loose. Carly Simon is singing softly on the radio when the first body comes into view.

The woman, who appears to be about 30, lies on a low rocky slope, face up, her left eye open. An arm reaches out. One of her Air Elway sneakers is half off, and most of her fingernail polish, traffic-cone orange, has long since worn away.

The woman is clad all in black, a common sight. Border agents and the coroner investigators say immigrants are told by guides to wear dark clothing so as not to stand out at night. In daylight, though, it absorbs the desert heat, cooking a person in her own sweatsuit.

The victim fits another puzzling trend that has unsettled the coroners, Mexican officials and border agents: Women have been turning up dead in the desert in greater numbers than anyone here remembers.

Already this year, Torres says, 16 women have died in Imperial County--about four times the norm and a sign that more women are being steered through the back country. In the past, a more familiar, and less risky, path would be through ports of entry, carrying fraudulent documents or tucked into the trunk of a car. No one seems quite sure why tactics have shifted.

Another coroner’s investigator, Richard Williams, had a case in which a 20-year-old woman from the state of Michoacan was dead under a bush, despite her brother’s attempt to shade her with a draped shirt. In the coroner’s photographs, a gallon water jug sat next to the body, with about a quart remaining.

Those who have seen death in the desert say water alone is no guarantee of surviving heat that can be so intense the overwhelmed body simply shuts down, part by part.

“These people die hard,” Williams says. “They go through a lot when they die out there. They suffer.” In a couple of months, the suffering will shift to freezing mountain tops.

Back in the desert, Din has taken her photographs. She, Hayes and three Border Patrol agents carry the body bag to the truck. Hayes will learn the next day from the survivor, the woman’s husband, that her name was Socorro Arroyo. They had set out at night, but in the morning she was overcome by the heat. The husband, Santiago Ochoa Romero, wearing a hospital gown and a dazed look, had not known his wife was dead.

It is easier to identify the second victim, a man lying 150 yards from where Arroyo collapsed. Hayes finds a Mexican voting card in the man’s pocket. “Cha-ching!” he calls out. The card has a photograph, a Mexico City address and a name: Gonzalo Mora Carrillo, 32. On his feet are brand-new soccer cleats.

A few yards away, the gravel bears an odd squiggle. Closer inspection shows it to be the indentations left by human fingers, digging at the ground. The site is close enough to the highway for the glint of passing trucks to be seen.

Survival Packs Go Unused

Miles from any paved road, fraying blue flags flutter over the desert atop 30-foot poles. Each marks a water station--a cardboard box containing jugs of water and packets of replenishing electrolyte mix, placed here by volunteers, some from as far away as Los Angeles. The boxes, arrayed in areas known to be traversed by migrants, are marked in English and Spanish.

Hayes drives past a string of the help stations along a dirt road that leads to his latest case, on a military bombing range 40 miles west of El Centro. It is the week’s final victim, the man who will be buried in the Holtville graveyard. He apparently had found none of the water stations.

Little of the corpse has survived coyotes’ scavenging; it is mainly a skeleton. Strewn nearby are scraps of clothing, a ball cap with the logo of a Mexico City soccer team and a dozen rib bones, which Hayes collects and puts in a plastic bag. He figures the man died at least a month earlier, around the time of a spate of deaths in the same area, called Carrizo Wash.

A bus ticket found when Hayes snips open the pockets suggests the man went through Mexicali, across the border from Calexico. There is about $12 in Mexican currency and a packet of antacid, labeled in Spanish. A stain on the ground beneath a creosote bush is probably where the man died, Hayes says. If so, he spent his last moments curled like a fetus.

No name will be known. The coroners find no useful clues, and Torres has nothing in his files with which to make a match.

The remains, assigned to the custody of the county public administrator’s office, will be held at the funeral home for two months until it is determined there is no hope of identifying the man. Some activists are calling on the Mexican government to establish a DNA database to improve the odds in these cases.

On burial day, the remains are placed in the cheap coffin and loaded by the mortuary workers, along with the second casket, into an aging Suburban for the ride to the Holtville graveyard. Funeral director Greg Marr steers the vehicle past a sugar plant, grazing sheep, a cookie-cutter subdivision and a field of cabbage.

The potter’s field, in a muddy expanse behind the main cemetery, is normally a dismal sight. But migrant-rights activists have decorated the graves for Day of the Dead, the traditional Mexican celebration of the deceased. Sugar skulls, marigolds and bright carnations sit alongside 2-foot-tall white crosses activists have brought previously. The crosses say, in Spanish, “Unidentified” and “Not Forgotten.”

Marr, a 31-year-old preacher’s grandson with deep roots in Imperial County, helps the three cemetery workers lower the caskets. One of the men removes his hat. The workers step away as Marr, standing over the graves, offers a brief dedication and recites the Lord’s Prayer. A tractor roars to life and the holes are quickly filled.

“This is probably the worst part of the job,” Marr says afterward. “Knowing people and knowing who they are and having the family all there to support each other--that’s the way to do things. That’s what we don’t have here.”

With a stick, he scrapes the thick mud from his shoes and then is gone, too. Around the graves, bees swarm the sugar faces of little skulls.