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Baylor scientist's work often confirms the worst for families of missing
Mexican immigrants
Story and photos by J.B. Smith
Tribune-Herald staff writer
When the bone chip arrived from Arizona, Lori Baker suited up and
entered the sealed inner sanctum of her laboratory at Baylor University.
Baker, a forensic anthropologist, froze the sample in liquid nitrogen,
then pulverized it. She used a series of chemical washes to isolate a
microscopic strand of mitochondrial DNA, then amplified a section of the
strand by copying it over and over. She used a machine to sequence the
segment so it appeared on a computer screen as a long string of letters
— G-A-T-C — representing the four chemicals that make up each rung of
DNA.
She would do the same with a blood sample from a woman in Tehuacán,
Mexico, named Cecilia Hernandez.
Once both tests were done, she would know whether the mitochondrial DNA
of the samples matched. If so, the woman was the boy’s maternal
relative. By process of elimination, he would prove to be the woman’s
son: Rosario Hernandez, age 16.
What Baker didn’t want to know was his story. She didn’t want to picture
a healthy teenager in a soccer jersey, dreaming of quitting his job at a
jeans factory in Mexico to work alongside his dad in a North Carolina
plant nursery.
She didn’t want to think of the tears his mother shed at the bus station
in Tehuacán as she begged him not to leave her. She didn’t want to think
of how he staggered with his 13-year-old cousin through the southern
Arizona desert or how in his delirium he took off his shoes and lay down
to die in the sun.
And she didn’t want to think of his family back home, hoping against
hope that the body she had just helped identify was someone else’s son.
“It’s much harder, once you see the pictures of the victims alive, to
let that go at night, when you’re trying to go to sleep, thinking of
their families,” Baker says. “Especially when you have young kids of
your own, imagining what it must be like for families to have to deal
with this kind of grief. It’s easier to be divorced from the details.”
First was the refusal of the family in Tehuacán to believe the body they
saw in the pictures was their son.
Second was a scrupulous medical examiner’s office in Pima County, Ariz.
“Along some other parts of the border, I’ve heard that a person with a
name association and an ID card gets buried as that person,” says Dr.
Bruce Anderson, the office’s forensic anthropologist. “To me, to leave
somebody unidentified is a lesser evil than to take whatever name comes
with the body and say, ‘This must be that person.’ That’s just heinous.”
That summer, the Mexican Consulate sent photos of the body to Rosario’s
parents, Maximino and Cecilia Hernandez. They weren’t convinced.
That face, those hairy legs weren’t his.
“To this day, I don’t think it looked like him,” Maximino Hernandez said
in an August 2007 interview. “He had a beard that was very thick for 15
days of travel. He appeared to be an older person.”
Their hope persisted against mounting evidence.
For Maximino, then living in North Carolina, the first troubling news
came when three people who made the trip arrived without his son and his
nephew, Eloy. Two immigrants were from Tehuacán; one was a youth from
Guatemala.
By now, Maximino knew the Border Patrol had rescued other family members
who fell behind in the Arizona desert: his brother-in-law, Faustino
Francisco; Faustino’s sister, Clara; and her friend, Elisa.
But the boys had seemed strong and able to complete the journey.
“What happened to the boys who were with you?” Maximino asked the
Guatemalan boy, the one who had befriended Eloy and Rosario along the
journey.
“If that was your son, he and the other one died,” the youth said.
“It couldn’t be,” Maximino said.
“Yes, I have no doubt,” the boy said.
Maximino quit his job at the plant nursery and made plans to return to
Mexico, keeping his hope alive.
Meanwhile, the Mexican Consulate in Tucson managed to track down the
family in Mexico. They used Rosario’s birth certificate, found with the
body of the barefoot boy discovered in Arizona’s rugged, 129,000-acre
Ironwood Forest National Monument on May 22, 2006. His birthplace:
Nopala, a rural village outside Tehuacán, Puebla, the small city where
the boys’ families now lived.
Working on information from the consulate, an immigrant assistance
official in the state of Puebla called the mayor of Nopala, who alerted
police and school officials to look for Rosario’s relatives.
A school girl, Rosario’s cousin, heard the news and ran home to tell her
mother that the boy was dead. A woman from Nopala traveled to Tehua-cán
to break the news to the boy’s mother, Cecilia.
* * *
At that point, Eloy’s fate was still a mystery.
“I thought anything could have happened,” recalls Faustino Francisco,
the 13-year-old boy’s father. “I couldn’t accept the reality. Rosario
was a little aggressive and I thought he might have gotten in a fight,
but Eloy was very calm, and he might have continued.”
But by now Faustino also knew first-hand the trials of the desert.
He called the Mexican Consulate’s office in Tucson and got in touch with
a young man named Jeronimo Garcia Ceballos, the consulate’s liaison for
families of missing Mexicans.
Garcia said consulate officials would search the morgues and Border
Patrol detention centers for the boy. But he had a question for
Faustino.
When Faustino was recuperating in the Tucson hospital after his
near-fatal ordeal in the desert, the consulate had sent somebody to ask
if there were others in his party.
Why had Faustino said no?
“I explained to him the rules of the desert, when you’re crossing there
or on the Rio Bravo,” Faustino recalls. “If La Migra catches you,
you don’t say that anyone went on ahead. You say, ‘Yeah, I came
alone.’ ”
Garcia had heard it all before. He was 30, a Mexicali doctor’s son who
went to work for the Mexican Foreign Service in 2004, straight out of
college. His first assignment: the excruciating job of telling families
day after day that their loved ones were dead.
Sometimes, they took a lot of convincing.
“In these kinds of cases, the family usually knows when the body is
found,” he says. “But sometimes they don’t accept that the person who
passed away is theirs. That’s normal.”
In this case, he also had to tell a father an even harder truth.
Rosario, Faustino’s nephew, was found only about 8 miles northeast of
where Faustino and the women were rescued on May 19. In short: The boy
died within a day or two of Faustino’s rescue.
The truth was that Faustino might have saved the lives of his nephew and
possibly his missing son by breaking the desert’s code of silence.
* * *
As the consular official and the father spoke, Dr. Anderson’s team at
the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office worked to identify the decayed
body of a young adolescent male found just a stone’s throw from the
scene of Rosario’s death. In his backpack was a school identification
card bearing the name Eloy Francisco, age 13.
The final answer came a month later, July 27, 2006. Dental records
proved it was, in fact, Eloy.
Garcia arranged to have the boy’s casket shipped back to Mexico on Aug.
28.
One more body was cleared from the overcrowded morgue at the Pima County
Medical Examiner’s Office. Scores lay unclaimed.
* * *
Bruce Anderson is a towering man with a deep voice, but his voice and
eyes register fatigue as he talks in his office in Tucson on a warm
Arizona afternoon in September 2007.
“I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’m not distracted by the
sights and sounds and smells,” he says. “But dealing with the families
and their grieving wears you down. Most of these people are young.
They’re reasonably healthy. They shouldn’t be dead. They get caught in a
bad situation, running out of water and, boom, they’re dead, with
devastating consequences to families.”
When it comes to identifying these bodies, Dr. Anderson hesitates to
call it a losing battle, yet victory is elusive.
In the last six years, his office has released some 1,000 cadavers of
border-crossers to families in Mexico and elsewhere, and he’s proud of
the work his staff has done.
But the backlog keeps growing.
“Even if something were to happen tomorrow and the numbers plummeted to
nothing, we’ve got 250 people we’ve failed to identify over the last six
years,” he says. “It’s really difficult to fix on the fly. You really
need to stop the bleeding before you can heal the wound. As long as this
is happening, it’s all we can do to concentrate on the 75 percent of
people we can identify.”
Lori Baker’s work is making a difference, he says. In the future, DNA
testing of such bodies may become a routine part of autopsies. The
database of DNA from families and victims becomes more and more useful
as it grows.
“Dr. Baker’s program holds great promise down the road to identify many
of these people who die in our jurisdiction through mitochondrial DNA,”
Anderson says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if three decades from now
identifications are still being made based on families coming forward,
giving blood samples.”
Baker handles some especially difficult cases, such as when only
fragments of a skeleton are found. Extracting DNA samples from partly
decayed bone is a difficult process, but Baker has specialized
experience in doing research on ancient humans and prehistoric mammals.
Unlike most forensic DNA scientists, her expertise is DNA extracted not
from the nucleus of a cell but from a cell structure called the
mitochondria. While nuclear DNA contains genes from both parents, the
mitochondria preserves only the copy found in the mother’s egg.
Mitochondrial DNA among maternal relatives, even over many generations,
is nearly identical, except for occasional mutations. So a sample of DNA
from the victim should match that of his mother, sibling, maternal aunt,
maternal grandmother or maternal great-grandmother.
In the case of the boy thought to be Rosario Hernandez, a mitochrondial
DNA match with his mother would prove he was related to her but not
exactly how. It would take additional evidence to show no other
relatives of his description could have died in the desert.
In the most difficult cases, no family members claim the bones and no
clue exists as to the person’s origin.
Baker is pioneering research to narrow down regional origins by
identifying populations that share certain mitchondrial DNA
characteristics. For example, the body might have Mayan characteristics
that suggest a man came from southern Mexico or Guatemala.
Other forensic experts are working to supplement those clues by studying
isotopes in the body’s tissues that suggest regional origins. For
example, someone from the silver mining areas around Guanajuato could
have high concentrations of metals in his bones.
No matter how effective the consulate, the medical examiners and Baker
become, they know they won’t usually be bearing good news to families.
“You have these highs of being pleased that you solved something, but
then you realize the implications,” Anderson says. “When you identify
one more person, that’s a good thing, right? But it’s not a good thing
for the family. It’s anything but that. It’s an emotional roller
coaster.”
Baker’s first match was in 2003 when she identified the body of a
border-crosser found in the Arizona desert as Rosita Cano Dominguez, 29,
from the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico.
“I really identified with her,” she says. “I was pregnant at the time
with my first child, and she had two daughters. When I made the match
with DNA, the daughters knew their mom wasn’t coming back. It was very
disturbing.”
Even so, Baker says the family gained solace, if only in the sense that
positive ID of the remains offered some closure.
“Her mother was very kind in saying that this was very important to
them, to have a place to visit her and pray and visit with her
daughter.”
Baker, 37, no longer has the time or energy to deal with the families,
given the mountain of cases she always has before her. She hopes the
elaborate standards and protocols she has developed for doing
mitochondrial DNA work on these bodies will allow other laboratories to
take on some of the cases in the future.
Baker has never contacted the families of Rosario and Eloy. She didn’t
know their stories until interviewed for this series.
“When we’re talking about a 13-year-old, it’s impossible for me to stop
thinking about him and what he must have gone through, the anguish his
family must go through,” she says. “I hope people realize we’re talking
about family units making this crossing. We’re talking about people of
all ages, and it’s because of our border policies.”
For Maximino and Cecilia Hernandez, hope died hard.
On Dec. 11, 2006, it was official. The DNA from the bone sample matched
Cecilia’s mitochondrial DNA. The barefoot boy could be no one but
Rosario Hernandez.
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