Mexico database to ID border-crosser bodies

Susan Carroll
Republic Tucson Bureau
May. 21, 2005 12:00 AM

TUCSON - The four strangers share the same headstone in the sun-baked pauper's cemetery.

The grave marker is nothing fancy. Just a note card in a gunmetal gray frame caked with dirt.

It lists the undocumented immigrants' John and Jane Doe numbers and the dates their bodies were found in the Arizona desert. advertisement




The deaths, recorded years ago and hundreds of miles apart, are among thousands the Mexican government has started adding to a new database designed to help people whose relatives have vanished crossing the 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexican border. The project, scheduled for launch in June, has taken on added urgency in Arizona as temperatures are expected to pass 100 degrees this weekend.

The U.S. Border Patrol is already fielding reports of lost migrants, presumed dead in Arizona's borderlands.


14 minutes of hope


The call came into the Yuma County emergency dispatch at 11:01 p.m. on May 2.

"I'm lost," Jose Ortiz told the dispatcher, crying into his cellphone. He could see no lights in the night sky, he said. The only information he had to offer was an empty desert landscape and one landmark, a copper mine.

He said he had crossed the U.S.-Mexican border 10 days earlier with his wife and four other undocumented immigrants. They were all dead, he said. The cellphone battery was dying, too.

Dispatcher Alfonso Zavala put out a call for help from the Border Patrol's search-and-rescue team. Ortiz could be anywhere in the hundreds of thousands of square miles of unpopulated desert in the western corner of the state. Dispatchers focused on the Copper Mountains in the middle of a no-man's land called the Lechuguilla Desert.

"I'm not walking anymore," Ortiz said, "because I don't want to leave my wife."

Fourteen minutes after Zavala got the call, the cellphone went dead. Border Patrol agents searched for days. They even subpoenaed the cellphone records and tried to pinpoint Ortiz's location. No one has found the six bodies.


Identifying the dead


Mexican medical examiners and foreign consulates in Arizona work together to identify the bodies and bones of undocumented immigrants and notify families but must deal with a heavy caseload, particularly in the summer. Each of the past two years, the bodies of more than 200 undocumented immigrants were discovered in the state, according to an Arizona Republic review of records.

When remains come into the morgue after months of exposure in the desert, they generally are unrecognizable because of the heat and the scavengers. Roughly one-quarter to one-third of the deaths along the length of the border each year are classified as John and Jane Does and marked for burial in pauper's graves.

The new computer system being tested by the Mexican government allows relatives of Mexicans who disappear along the border, and in U.S. cities and towns, to file a missing-person's report from their homes, in government offices in Mexico or in one of the 36 consulates in the United States.

Consular officials then will be able to search through a database of Mexican passports and consular ID cards, known as matriculas consulares. The same database has fingerprints and photos.

Alejandro Martinez, who is in charge of the Mexican consulate's system in Douglas, said the computer database is already online, although it's still being fine-tuned and no matches have been made so far.

"We have been instructed to start feeding into the system," Martinez said. "It's going to take some time."

Mexican officials hope to add a DNA component to the system, based on an idea developed by Lori Baker, a Texas anthropologist, and her husband, a computer-science professor, who both work at Baylor University in Waco.

In August 2003, Baker used DNA testing to positively identify the remains of Rosa Dominguez Cano, whose skeleton was discovered in the desert southwest of Tucson on Christmas Day in 2002.

Since then, Baker has paired up with the Mexican government, which is considering paying for more DNA testing in cases where a match looks promising. The database Baker and her husband created and funded with mostly their own money contains the same basic information now being input into the government system.

"This is just a miracle for me," Baker said, "because I feel like over the next year or two there are going to be so many families finally getting answers."


Presumed dead


Ken Montufar, a Mesa landscaper, has been searching for his brother since July 17.

Porfirio Lugardo Montufar, 31, left his young son and pregnant wife in Hidalgo, Mexico, and crossed the border illegally near Yuma. He called his brother to ask for about $250 to make it north to the Valley. Ken sent the money through Western Union and waited.

"He didn't call me back to get the PIN number," Ken said Friday.

He keeps checking with law enforcement, even jails, hoping his brother was just locked up. Still, he said, "I don't think at this point that he's alive."

Mexican officials hope the database will give closure to families who have searched for years without answers.

Using the database, the family of Jane Doe No. 40 could search for the white rosary she was wearing when she died. Or the parents of the teenage boy buried with her could search for the herringbone pullover found with his skeleton.

The family of another John Doe under that same headstone may recognize the phone number, apparently from Mexico, jotted on a piece of worn paper: 44-71-68.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... eaths.html