Memorial Tells More About the Living

When California native Fernando Ramos Jr. died in Ohio last fall, no one cried, no one cared, no one came.

Ramos, who apparently drank himself to death at age 52, was kept in the cooler at Akron City Hospital for five days. When no living soul dropped by to claim him, he was shipped to the morgue at the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office.

“One of the duties of this office is to make a diligent attempt to notify family that their loved one has died,” forensic investigator David Turney wrote me late last year. He wondered if I could help him and partner Gary Guenther track down anyone who might have known Ramos out West.

Turney had learned that Ramos had been born in Fresno on Jan. 17, 1951, to parents who listed their address as a farm workers camp, “Cabin No. 28.” But there was no record of Ramos having lived in California for the last two decades. When he was here, he was no saint, keeping police busy with mostly petty crimes.

I wasn’t entirely sold on the idea of writing an obit on the off chance a relative or long-ago acquaintance might see it. I encouraged Turney to keep me posted, though, because I was curious.

Not about Ramos, but about Turney.

By all accounts, Ramos was a liar, a con, a junkie, a drunk and a draft dodger. Turney dug up a rap sheet that had gotten stamped in Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Norwalk, San Luis Obispo County and Arizona.

And yet, while juggling other cases and sitting in on autopsies, Turney refused to close the Ramos case and let the city of Akron drop him into a pauper’s grave.

If that’s the way it ended, he told me, Ramos wouldn’t even get a stone with his name on it. He’d get a sad little marker with a number.

“I have a fundamental problem with someone going in the ground anonymously,” Turney said. “It’s akin to a domestic MIA.”

In his e-mails, Turney’s enthusiasm always exceeded what you would expect from a county functionary who has sat at the same desk for 19 years, deconstructing lives in the company of the dead.

“Update!” Turney wrote me Feb. 27, more than five months into a chase that involved endless phone work and record searches in Lancaster, Barstow, Pomona and other locales. “I may have a lead, albeit tenuous.”

The message could have been narrated by Sam Spade.

“Anyway, I went over the Ramos file again. I guess I was looking for something to reach out and bite me.”

In reexamining records for overlooked clues, Turney had discovered that Ramos’ ex-wife had gone back to her maiden name after they split. It gave him new hope of finding her, if not next of kin.

But like everything else, the lead was a mad dash up a dead-end street. To Turney’s dismay, his redrawing of Ramos’ life was a sketch of smoke and shadows.

Fernando Ramos Jr., who also went by David Ramos, might have been a carpenter at one time. For a while, he hung his hat in Barstow, where he was acquainted with a woman who ran a porn shop. She said Ramos had claimed to have a brother who had been murdered and a sister who had committed suicide, but Turney found no record of either sibling.

Ramos drifted East for reasons unknown, claimed to be Tiger Woods’ former caddy and tried to pass himself off as a Native American so he could scam federal benefits.

Turney relayed all his findings to me without judgment, revealing more about himself than about Ramos. It doesn’t matter how far they’ve fallen, he wrote to me. In the end, they’re all human beings.

Turney, a former cop and Navy vet and a father of five -- including an 18-year-old who wants to be president of the United States -- begged his boss for more time to track next of kin. Whenever I heard from him, I’d imagine him at his desk with Ramos in a nearby freezer, waiting to be rescued from eternal anonymity.

“I’m not sure what the driving force is with Dave,” Turney’s boss, Dr. Lisa Kohler, told me. “But this is his crusade.”

He believes in his heart, she said, that everyone deserves to have some proof that they existed.

If you work in the waiting room to the next world, confronted daily with your own mortality, maybe grace is your only salvation.

Last week, Turney finally had good news. An Akron men’s shelter where Ramos once lived contacted a Greek Orthodox Church, which is making arrangements for a funeral Mass. Ramos will be cremated and given a proper resting place at Holy Cross Cemetery in Akron.

“I’m disappointed we didn’t find next of kin,” Turney said. “But I’m very, very pleased he’ll go into consecrated ground.”

And so ends the story of California native Fernando Ramos Jr., 1951-2003, who lived hard and left before meeting his last best friend.

“I would go to the same lengths for anyone, and have,” Turney wrote to me. “It’s what is right and decent.... It’s also a matter of giving someone a shred of dignity in the end they may not have had in life.”

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.