Migrant identification a grisly mission
County coroner works grim corner of debate over illegal immigration
LAREDO, Texas — The body on the steel table was a Hispanic woman, probably in her 20s, found on an isolated Texas ranch. In the light of a large bay window overlooking scrub brush and mesquite in the shimmering heat, Dr. Corinne Stern quickly determined the cause of death was exposure.
The medical examiner’s next quest was harder: Who is she?
After photographing a silver-rimmed tooth, the woman’s blue-and-green-striped shirt and an earlobe with three earrings, Stern searched the clothing. She found a wallet-sized photo of a girl and a scrap of paper with phone numbers.
Wasting no time, Stern left the autopsy suite and summoned one of her Spanish-speaking investigators. She punched a number into her office phone; a man answered, “Bueno.”
“I have a young lady in my office, and we found your telephone number,” she said. “Are you missing a relative or do you know someone who may have been carrying your phone number?”
As the medical examiner for Webb County, a 3,400-squaremile jurisdiction of 262,000 residents in South Texas, Stern works in a macabre niche of the national debate over illegal immigration: identifying the dead.
Her struggle to put names to the bodies offers a glimpse into how intractable the border crisis is as it strains the services of South Texas’ counties. Stern, who estimates that the task takes up to 25 percent of her office’s resources, is dealing with migrants from at least six countries, confronting bureaucratic and linguistic hurdles along the way.
She has done at least 400 autopsies of immigrants since becoming Webb’s medical examiner in 2006. On any given day, Stern plays the role of forensic expert, homicide detective or even diplomat, asking the governments of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and other nations for help in naming the dead and getting their remains home.
“I’m the last doctor they will ever see,” Stern, 48, said of the victims. “My job is bittersweet. I bring families closure, but I also end their hope.”
The work is time-consuming and costly. A Texas sheriff’s coalition estimates that each dead crosser costs local authorities $5,000, including the burial of some who go unclaimed or are never identified. Foreign governments and relatives of the victims pay to repatriate the bodies.
In the last 15 years, more than 5,000 migrants have died crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, according to the Department of Homeland Security. At least 225 have perished since January.
Almost all of Stern’s victims are adults. The thousands of unaccompanied children who have crossed the Mexico border in the past year are more likely to surrender to authorities, while adults try to avoid detection. Stern has autopsied three juvenile border crossers over the last 18 months.
Stern relies on a small staff — five investigators and autopsy technicians, and a cadaver-tracking dog named Rufus. The challenge is evident in a 6-inch-thick binder of missing persons reports and a large dry-erase board for tracking 35 John and Jane Does who have arrived from Webb and nine other Texas counties she serves under contract. She says she has determined the identities of more than 60 percent of border crossers.
Since January, Stern has autopsied 92 border crossers. She has received so many bodies that she declared an emergency in June and obtained a second portable cooler to store corpses.
Calls to retrieve bodies in her own county come at all hours, but Stern usually won’t send her staff out after dark. The terrain is too rough and there are rattlesnakes, not to mention the risk of getting washed away. Last month, while retrieving a “floater,” Stern fell into the Rio Grande and had to scramble back to shore.
After medical school at the University of North Texas Health Science Center and serving her residencies, she became the chief medical examiner for El Paso County. In 2006, she took the job in Webb County, lured in part by the chance to establish the jurisdiction’s medical examiner’s office.
In September, Stern tentatively identified a 34-year-old immigrant who had the ID and phone number of a friend in his pocket. Stern couldn’t rely on overseas ID, however, and the friend and the man’s family weren’t able to identify the body based on the personal effects. The corpse was too decomposed to lift fingerprints.
That left only comparing his DNA to possible relatives. Stern got the results — they were a match. But she couldn’t say to whom. The nonprofit group has refused to provide the names of those they’ve sampled.
“I can’t release the bodies without the names,” she told the consulate official on the call.
The official promised to look into the matter.
After hanging up, Stern leaned back in her chair. She and her staff exchanged jokes and talked about the cake they’d share on Friday to celebrate the departure of an investigator.
At 4 p.m., as she settled into her office to dictate notes on recent autopsies, the phone rang. The body of another border crosser was on its way.