Common Grave Is Last Home for the Unknowns
http://www.latimes.com/news/yahoo/la-me-morgue26jul26,0,6213...
By Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writer
TIJUANA ? Nobody knew the woman with the finely manicured eyebrows and the cross tattooed across her left arm. Or, if someone did, they did not come
forward to claim her. She had a rich head of black hair, pulled behind her head. It seemed she was probably somewhere in her 30s.
For nearly two weeks, her battered body lay on a metal shelf in a large freezer room at this city's morgue, a stucco building just outside of downtown
that is surrounded by funeral homes.
Then case number TIJ-0120 was placed in a particleboard casket, like the other bodies of the unknown and unclaimed, and trucked to the city's fosa
comun ? common grave. There, the corpses are buried nine deep, each grave marked by a single metal rod with numbers assigned to the dead who lie
below.
Most of the unclaimed are Mexicans whose visions of crossing to a better life in the United States have ended tragically ? in car accidents, stabbings
or sudden illnesses. Some are Americans ? tourists who had been seeking a bit of revelry or retirees who had moved south of the border in search of
cheaper housing.
The morgue and common grave are among the first places authorities search for the missing. They are among the last places many relatives can imagine
losing their loved ones.
Yet more than 500 unclaimed bodies are buried, on average, each year in Tijuana. Through June 1 this year, Tijuana officials had buried 288 bodies in
the common grave of Municipal Cemetery 11.
Nearly two-thirds were not identified. In Los Angeles County ? which has nearly eight times as many people as Tijuana ? only six bodies could not be
identified during that same period.
The bodies of the unclaimed and unidentified will soon fill the 11th cemetery of the unknowns in Tijuana?perhaps the best measure of this city's
status as Mexico's ultimate crossroads, a place where the search for a better life sometimes meets lost dreams and a lonely end.
When would-be migrants don't make it north across the border, they are left with few options. Some are able to find temporary jobs and homes. But
others sleep on the streets, where they risk getting robbed or assaulted.
Still others become criminals themselves. Many end up dead, far from home. They often don't carry identification, for fear authorities will catch them
and send them back where they came from.
In those cases, there is not much Baja California authorities can do, said the head of Tijuana's morgue, Angel Nicolas Ayub Bejarano. The unidentified
dead are fingerprinted but, without a central database, there often is no match. "We don't even know where to start looking," Ayub said.
Friends and relatives come each day to the city morgue to search for those who have disappeared. They post fliers, scraps of paper and photographs ? a
collage of hope.
One paper reads, "Missing since 3-9-02 @ 1:00 p.m. Sergio Alcala. Ht 5'3" Wt 140 lbs." On another is scribbled: "Arturo Cordova Rivas 60 years old.
Disappeared in May 1995."
Inside an examination room, a doctor conducted an autopsy on a man who had been killed and whose body had been burned beyond recognition. He carried
no identification and soon would join 22 others who lay on the shelves. Eight were unidentified. By early the following week, 10 bodies were ready to
be buried ? wrapped in blankets and tagged with pieces of paper marking where and when they had been found and where they would be buried.
Several men placed the caskets onto rollers, loaded them into government vans and drove them to the cemetery in Colonia La Presa, on a hill above the
city. The vans first passed through a section of the cemetery filled with elaborate headstones, blue crosses, plastic yellow daffodils, fresh wreaths,
rainbow balloons. Then they arrived at the desolate section with uneven mounds of dirt, littered with broken bottles, plastic spoons and discarded
diapers. A lone headstone pays tribute to the hundreds of bodies: "In memory of the unknown."
Six men used a rope to lower the bodies, one by one, into deep pits. There were no families, no flowers, no prayers. As the men worked, they joked and
complained about the weight of the caskets.
The families think these people are in the United States, said Benjamin Esparza, after he lowered a casket into a grave. "They're waiting for a
letter. But here is where you find them."
The cemetery manager, Felipe Urbalejo Ramirez, said the situation gets to him occasionally. "You know where you're born, but you don't know where
you're going to end up," he said, writing down another casket number, the gravesite number and the number of levels the casket would be buried below
the surface. After the final body was lowered, the staff members tossed in their latex gloves and a tractor filled up the holes.
Every day, relatives call the U.S. Consulate, frantically looking for family members who haven't returned home. But even Americans who find their
loved ones buried in the cemetery sometimes must struggle to get the bodies home.
Richard Silver, a 47-year-old American who worked as a nursing aide in San Diego, was buried in one of the city's common graves about five years ago.
He had called his father in Las Vegas in May 1997 and said he was going to Tijuana for the weekend to look for a cheaper apartment.
Ed Silver began to worry the next week when he hadn't heard from his son. He notified the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana and the San Diego Police
Department. A few weeks later, a friend saw a photograph of Richard Silver at the morgue and called Ed Silver to tell him that the son had been
killed. Ed Silver and his wife, Barbara, traveled to Tijuana to see where Richard was buried and were stunned that there wasn't even a headstone. "My
heart just ached," she said.
The Silvers bought a plot in Las Vegas and tried to get the body brought home. They were told by both American and Mexican officials that they had to
wait five years before the body could be exhumed. Now those years have passed and Ed Silver said he is determined to try to get his son's body home.
"It's still an open wound and it has never closed," he said.
After another American, Harry Lerch, was killed south of the border, his brother didn't have the $2,000 to pay to transport the body back to the U.S.
By the time his friends and a veterans support group could raise the money and clear bureaucratic hurdles, the 56-year-old Lerch had already been
buried. "It was so sad, the way he died, and it was so sad, the way he went to his grave," said a friend, Linda Abbud.
Countless Mexicans from throughout the country do not have financial resources behind them and can't afford to claim or transport their relatives home
from Tijuana, or to have them exhumed if they have already been buried.
Mexican authorities have been taking some steps to decrease the numbers of unidentified dead. The forensic department of the state of Baja California
started a Web site, with photographs of the dead and any identifying characteristics: scars, tattoos, freckles. After reading a flashing warning about
what they will see, family members can scroll through photographs of bodies at the morgue and at the city's cemeteries and get phone numbers to call.
Though the department is not keeping statistics of family members found through the Web site, director Francisco Castro Trenti said he believes there
have been successes. He points to nearly 20,000 hits on the Web site since it started in November.
"This registry can be consulted from anywhere in the world," said Castro, as he pulled up gruesome photographs of the unknowns from his Tijuana
office. "It is making the search easier."
But migrants' rights activists say more needs to be done to identify the dead ? on both sides of the border. The bodies should be kept in the Tijuana
morgue longer than 15 days to allow families to come forward, they say. The Mexican government should also improve its fingerprint databases and
should provide families more assistance in determining if their relatives have perished, said Claudia Smith, border project director for the
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.
Families may be able to recognize possessions to identify their dead relatives but there is no place for them to do so, leaving them without the
certainty of knowing if their loved ones have died. She added that the bodies still unidentified should not just be relegated to a common grave
without traditional burial rites.
"There are certain obligations that the living owe to the dead," Smith said. "You need to show respect for the remains by giving them a dignified
burial."
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