100 October 2019_Esquire
This work, of exhuming the unnamed, was being carried out by
two forensic anthropologists and their students, who had traveled
to this cemetery from two universities, Baylor, in Waco, Texas, and
the University of Indianapolis. After placing #0383 in the new bag,
several of the students walked him to a staging area. There, a member
of the Brooks County Sheriff ’s Department hoisted him into a refrig-
erated trailer, where he would be safe until he was driven out of the
burial ground and into a temporary holding facility two miles away.
The plywood box containing the remains of Case #0383 had been
oriented east to west next to those of five oth-
ers—one female, four males—in a long, shal-
low trench near the back of the cemetery. Based
on a few scattered metal markers (“Unknown
Male,” “Unknown Female”) and the memories
of the cemetery’s groundskeepers, who pointed
out places they believed migrants were bur-
ied, the forensics team planned to do perhaps
a dozen exhumations.
“But the more we dug, the more we found,”
says Justin Maiers, an Indianapolis biol-
ogy student who spent a week at the burial
ground, digging.
More trenches, more plywood boxes, more
body bags wrapped around human bones.
These were not “mass graves,” as the media
would later report, but individual burial con-
tainers—in some cases, plain garbage bags—
crammed together in no particular arrange-
ment. From what the volunteers could tell, graves had been gouged
wherever they could fit, sometimes squeezed between other head-
stones. Each set of remains took more than an hour to measure, map,
document, and remove.
It was somber, quiet for the most part: the light scratching of tools,
the groan of old wood, the beep and click of digital cameras. The
workers knelt and stood, knelt and stood, lifted, lowered, lifted, low-
ered—grave after makeshift grave, new batches of remains in vary-
ing states of decomposition. The temperature was 97 degrees. Their
hands grew blistered and swollen. Bruises mottled their legs. Sweat
stung their eyes and ran down their arms. Sometimes a member of
the team had to step away, just for a moment.
Before long, the volunteers were working in
four-minute shifts with eight-minute rests.
Had Case #0383 been investigated and sampled
for DNA before burial—both of which are required
by the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure whenever
unidentified human remains are found—his unusual
origins might have been easier to determine. But he
was buried as a John Doe in a public cemetery with-
out his family knowing where he was or what had
happened to him. His name, where he came from—
where any of the people came from—the answers
to these questions would take four years of forensic
analysis, fueled by fundraising, coalition building,
and a good deal of lucky Internet searching, to find.
Still, anyone could guess with reasonable cer-
tainty how he died: His remains were found in
Brooks County, one of the poorest counties in Texas,
with a population of seventy-two hundred spread
out over 944 square miles. Death certificates are is-
sued by a justice of the peace, and the closest medi-
cal examiner is almost a hundred miles away.
At last count, 730 people had died over a
fourteen-year period in the Brooks County desert
trying to enter the United States.
It was simply not equipped.
Many of these deaths could be traced to one cruel quirk of geog-
raphy: the unusual location of the Falfurrias Border Patrol check-
point. Every public American highway that radiates out from the
border is monitored by U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP),
which migrants will do just about anything to avoid. In most other
Texas counties, the distance between the physical border and the
highway checkpoint is usually less than five miles, which many peo-
ple can walk in a few hours. Falfurrias Station,
which occupies a compound on U. S. 281, sits
seventy miles north of the border, a distance
that can take migrants anywhere from three
days to a week to cross.
By the end of its first week of work, the foren-
sics team had exhumed the remains of sixty-
eight people. It could take years to identify the
bodies, if that was even possible.
Though the researchers did not yet know it,
the bodies of almost one hundred additional
migrants still lay beneath their feet.TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO, when she
was an undergraduate studying anthropology
at Baylor, Lori Baker met one Texas sheriff who
wanted to keep the skull of a young migrant boy
on his desk, like a trophy.
This was in her home—in her backyard.
By the time she finished her doctorate and began working to iden-
tify human remains in forensic cases, there was no cohesive protocol
in place for handling the deaths of foreign nationals in south Texas.
So Baker established an initiative called the Reuniting Families Proj-
ect to provide a framework for identifying them.
That was in 2003. A decade later, she arrived in Falfurrias to spear-
head the first field season at the Sacred Heart Burial Park, and she
was gutted by what she found. Dozens of people—was it more?—
who had suffered in life enough to risk the physical torture of a bor-
der crossing had been discarded in death.
“There was no respect, no dignity toward those individuals,” Baker
says of the migrant burials in anonymous holes.I. CASE #0383
Case #0383 was pulled from a plywood box by the gloved
hands of three researchers wearing white Tyvek suits and
medical masks. It was a May morning, and the air was damp
and heavy under a hot iron of clouds. The rest of the team
moved quickly around them, before the sandy soil could col-
lapse the hole. Grasping the corners of his white body bag,
they lifted the man’s crumpled form to the surface, where a
new bag, a clean white sheet to cover it, and a small bouquet
of flowers waited. The sound of the long zipper mixed with
the scuff of boots in the dry dirt and the steady inhaling and
exhaling of the workers in the heat, the only other sounds in
the Sacred Heart Burial Park in Falfurrias, Texas, southwest
of Corpus Christi, eighty miles north of the border between
the United States and Mexico.
THE SKELETON
IS CLEANED,
AND PERSONAL EFFECTS—KIDS’ DRAWINGS,
FAMILY PHOTOS,
ROSARIES—
ARE REMOVED.
THEY ARE USEFUL IN THEIDENTIFICATION
PROCESS.