Finding the Lost

His family knew it was Christian when they saw the photo of the bright blue Nike shoes.

Christian Gonzalez was brought to the United States from Mexico by his parents when he was eight years old. Raised by his loving, close family in Palestine, Texas, the young man was deported the month before the implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that would have allowed him to legally stay in the U.S.

Christian tried to make it work in Mexico but wanted to return to his family. “His whole life was here in Texas,” says Zaira Gonzalez, his sister. Wearing his bright blue Nikes, and after making it across the border with a smuggler in September 2012, he was left to struggle on foot through arid ranchland in Brooks County, Texas. He called his dad and told him that he couldn’t go any farther, and then all communication stopped.

Many migrating people die in Brooks County. Though not immediately adjacent to the border, Brooks is home to the Falfurrias Border Patrol checkpoint, one of the busiest in the U.S. To skirt the checkpoint, smugglers let migrants out of vehicles before they reach it to cut through flat, sandy, mesquite-dotted ranchland that lacks distinctive landmarks. Lost, hammered by dehydration and heat, and sickened by contaminated water from cattle tanks, many die. The Brooks County Sheriff’s Office estimates only one in five migrants who go missing there is found; since 2009, more than 3,500 migrants are presumed to have died there.

The Gonzalez’s exhaustive search began right away. They acknowledged the most likely scenario—that Christian had died in his attempt to reunite with them—and they kept looking, for either his remains or the possibility that he’d made it to safety but had not been in touch. They didn’t discover Christian’s fate until six years later. Found on a ranch, his remains had been turned over to a funeral home that buried him, shoes and all, in a cemetery’s unmarked area. His story might have ended there if not for forensic anthropology professor Kate Spradley, Ph.D., and her Operation Identification (OpID) at Texas State University.

Spradley and her students exhume and respectfully examine skeletons and other remains of unidentified migrants in Texas, applying scientific techniques to bring justice and dignity to many long-term dead who perished in the unforgiving expanses of rural counties near the Texas-Mexico border. The team’s overarching goals include reuniting families with their loved ones’ remains.

Christian’s remains were exhumed and examined, DNA samples were taken, and his personal effects, including his blue shoes, were photographed. OpID uploaded the results to NamUs, a database of missing and unidentified people managed by the University of North Texas Health Science Center and the National Institute for Justice.

Jeff Wilson

Through a chance recommendation in a Facebook group, Zaira learned about NamUs and how families could submit DNA samples in hope of finding a match. She also looked through the database of people who had died in Texas and came across an unidentified person whose effects included the bright blue Nikes.

“We were able to bury him in April 2018. It brought us closure,” Zaira says. “I think it’s amazing what OpID does.”

When studying deaths along the South Texas border, the worlds of human rights, immigration policy, and science can intersect quite clearly in Dr. Spradley’s research.

Anthropology is the study of humanity, utilizing natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to tell the story of people over time. Forensic anthropology creates biological profiles based on human remains in varying states of decomposition and is often used in the justice system to solve crimes. Scientific analysis such as measurement, DNA sampling, and careful cataloging of a skeleton’s characteristics help develop a biological profile, which includes the manner of death, whether the person experienced trauma or disease, their gender and approximate age, ethnicity, race, and how long ago they died. Other key information that is cataloged includes a case identification number, the precise Global Positioning System coordinates (GPS) location where the remains were discovered and collected, and preserved personal effects.

When an unidentified person’s remains are found, Texas law calls for a forensic examination, DNA sample collection, and submission of paperwork to a database of unidentified and missing people. But the large number of undocumented migrant deaths in the state, combined with few financial resources and a lack of clearly communicated systems and procedures, have led many overwhelmed counties to simply bury remains, usually without documenting the location of the burials.

At any time, thirty to fifty Texas State University students are working on OpID-related projects. Undergrads to doctoral students find a place in the endeavor, a point of pride for Spradley, who intentionally provides opportunities for applied forensic anthropological fieldwork.

“It’s not possible to do this without students,” Spradley says. “And because we have a lot of diversity at Texas State, there’s often students from the Rio Grande Valley who I take with me. This work is very meaningful for them and provides a service in their own backyards. I would like someone from this area to replace me someday.”

Currently, without the OpID team, there’s nobody to investigate the identity of these deaths. “There is no direct perpetrator of a crime involved in these deaths, so once they are buried, there is no further investigation,” Spradley says.  “Law enforcement isn’t going to do it. Law enforcement from other countries isn’t going to do it. So for these particular long-term dead, if we weren’t doing it, nobody would be doing it.”

In the process, Spradley has exposed systemic flaws in migrant policy, state law, and criminal justice that ignore the United States’ ongoing mass disaster that started in 1994. That’s when the federal migration policy “Prevention Through Deterrence” began funneling migrants through deadly territory in Texas in an attempt to dissuade people from trying to enter the U.S. But the fatal terrain didn’t stop individuals seeking to escape political unrest, gang violence, and extreme poverty, or to simply reunite with their families. Now Texas’s migrant death toll leads the nation.