FINDING CLOSURE WITH HELP OF DNA
Initiative gives families the chance to help locate, ID missing loved ones
She’d been hoping for the call for more than six years, though in the end, she wasn’t sure she really wanted to be the one to answer the phone.
It finally rang on the afternoon of Nov. 10, 2015, as Marilú Chávez was busy cooking Mexican food at the Houston restaurant where she worked. She doesn’t remember who called or what exactly he said, just this:
“We have been able to identify the remains of your brother.”
The news struck her as hard as a block of concrete.
“I was petrified,” she recalled, then stopped for a moment, trying to slow her breath and control her grief. “I had to tell the family. I had to call my mother …”
Yet that call brought a measure of relief after so many years of uncertainty for a family that had long wondered what had become of Adalberto Chávez.
Finding Chávez was possible in large part thanks to an initiative, launched in 2015 by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, called Missing in Harris County Day. It’s one of several efforts to retrieve DNA from families missing relatives in the hope of identifying unclaimed
remains in Houston and across Texas. The challenge is especially acute at the border, where hundreds — maybe thousands — of remains lie unclaimed or undiscovered.
Adalberto had traveled from Houston back to Mexico in 2009 to visit his ailing father. Going was no problem, but coming back as an undocumented immigrant was a different story. He kissed his mother goodbye, then called once from an unknown location on his return across the border.
“Everything is fine, mom; don’t worry.”
The 33-year-old was never heard from again, and the questions mounted. Had he died after reaching Texas? Was he a victim of smugglers? Or had he simply decided not to return to his life and family in the United States?
The call brought answers and stirred emotions: “Knowing what happened felt as if Beto had died twice, living again all that anguish we felt when my brother disappeared,” Marilú Chávez said.
She has been the main line of communication between family on both sides of the border and the authorities. This is the first time she has been able to speak about what happened, a personal tragedy but one that’s common for many families in Houston.
To help families track lost relatives, officials collected DNA samples from people at the Missing in Harris County event last year and again this year. They then looked for a match with unidentified skeletal remains registered in a national database system called NamUS.
Sharon Derrick, a forensic anthropologist with the Harris County forensics institute and a leader of the initiative, wanted to tackle an enormous problem with a particular impact in Texas — something experts like her describe as a “silent disaster.”
There are 1,362 unidentified remains from Texas in the NamUS database, representing more than one for every 10 nationwide. Many of those were found along the border, but the database includes bodies discovered across the state. In Harris County, for instance, the number is 304.
The unidentified cases from the border region account only for the ones reported by medical examiners and coroners. Many other bodies are never found, including the remains of immigrants who die in remote areas while crossing the Texas border with Mexico.
Between 400 and 500 people die every year crossing the Río Grande, said Hipólito Acosta in his book “The Shadow Catcher.” Acosta, a former district director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Houston and former border patrol agent, was decorated for his undercover infiltrations in smuggling operations.
After the moody and deceptive waters of the Río Grande comes “the second border,” as Urbino “Benny” Martínez, the new sheriff of Brooks County, puts it.
That border lies near the tiny town of Falfurrias, 70 miles north of the Río Grande. With checkpoints along U.S. 281, the Border Patrol’s corridor No. 2 covers more than 1,000 square miles of Brooks and southern Jim Wells County — considered by the agency to be the heaviest area of undocumented people and narcotics traffic in the state.
The immigrants journey here through hostile land where high temperatures, little water and thorny shrubs can end their lives. In Texas, unlike other states, they frequently die on private property that’s inaccessible without permission, even by authorities or nonprofit groups trying to save lives.
Rolando Garza, appointed as one of Brooks County’s justices of the peace a year ago, describes the situation as “heartbreaking.”
“It’s the hardest thing ever when I am called to see an immigrant found dead in my precinct,” he said. “Their bodies are … you know, all that inclemency of nature, and the animals …”
Frequently, immigrants crossing the border don’t carry any documents, and therefore, authorities are unable to identify their bodies or contact families.
Before 2013, remains were buried in Falfurrias’ Sacred Heart Cemetery without collecting forensic information that would have helped with their identification, said Krista Latham, professor of anthropology at the University of Indiana.
In the summers of 2013 and 2014, volunteer professors and students from Indiana and Baylor universities exhumed about 120 sets of remains from that graveyard. One of them belonged to Adalberto Chávez.
In 2015, Harris County collected 45 DNA samples from family members of missing persons, including from Marilú Chávez and Karen Olvera, a niece of Adalberto Chávez’s. From simple saliva samples, a match was made and one mystery solved.
So far, seven local families from last year’s Missing in Harris County Day have been tied to unidentified bodies found in border counties — all but one from Brooks, according to Eduardo Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center, which participated in the initiative.
“We receive continuous calls from families asking about their missing relatives, and the fact that we were able to solve these cases during the first year after the Missing Day is a step forward,” Canales said. More needs to be done, he said. “We need families with missing people to come forward. We can help them.”
Derrick said many families are unaware of the tools available to help in their search for relatives, such as the NamUS database. Some fear contacting authorities or face language barriers, she said.
Both Canales and Martinez believe that there are ways to regulate the flow of undocumented workers instead of trying to cut it, which they find unrealistic. Such an approach, they say, would save lives and money.
Martinez suggests investing in a biometric system that could track everyone coming or going.
Missing in Harris County Day was held again on May 14 this year, and authorities hope to find more matches from the samples taken.
Marilú Chávez and her nieces spoke to encourage other families to seek answers. So did Latham, the anthropologist from Indiana who helped identify Adalberto Chávez.
José Torres, a construction worker in Houston, has had no luck in the search for his missing wife.
“The coyote left her to her death in the Falfurrias area,” he said. “Somebody from the group that was coming together called me to tell me later.”
That was four years ago. He is still hoping for the call.
“To me, it was a miracle that we found my brother,” Marilú Chávez said. If they hadn’t gone last year to the Harris County event, she said, “we would not know what happened.”
In the next few days, Adalberto Chávez’s family will finally get permission to take him home.
It has been almost seven months since the DNA match.
Newly appointed Justice of the Peace Adela Quintanilla, from Brooks County, told the Chronicle that she only recently signed the documents to change his death certificate from unidentified.
That was the paper anthropology professor Kate Spradley needed to release his remains from Texas State University, where Falfurrias excavations were processed for DNA samples.
The Mexican Consulate in Austin said its necessary paperwork is now ready, too.
“All I want is the body of my son,” his mother, Maria, said from Mexico.
Family and friends are waiting in Ciudad del Maíz, in the central state of San Luis Potosí, to give Chávez a typical final farewell.
They will gather to remember him, not as someone who disappeared but as the smiling person he used to be, and they will listen to his favorite music: Mexican rancheras.
For his sister, it’s “a little joy at last.”
“It’s the hardest thing ever when I am called to see an immigrant found dead in my precinct. Their bodies are … you know, all that inclemency of nature, and the animals. …” Rolando Garza, Brooks County justice of the peace