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.

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.

“Deaths are a part of the immigration policy,” says Spradley, whose measured, calm demeanor does not hide her sadness and determined anger at the situation. “What really strikes me is that you have a federal policy that impacts deaths at the local jurisdictional level, and within the poorest counties in the state, and you don’t provide any funding for this. If you’re going to have a policy that leads to deaths, you should at least try to identify the dead, and give the counties the resources they need to process them.”

Dr. Spradley’s research, anchored by the deaths of migrating people, reaches in multifaceted directions. Her contributions include ongoing, groundbreaking work in documenting forensic characteristics of Mexican and Central American populations. This foundational research resource supplements extant databases based solely on white or Black populations.

But it’s the human connection that resonates most. OpID works closely with the South Texas Human Rights Center, the Brooks Country Sheriff’s Department, and many other entities, including the Forensic Border Coalition that Spradley co-founded, in bringing dignity to the dead, and closure to grieving families who long to know where their loved ones are and to give them a proper burial.

Partnering individuals and organizations keeps Spradley from losing hope, even when faced with daunting circumstances. “Individuals can make a difference, but if I was working on these issues all by myself, I don’t know if I could do it,” she says. “It’s only by working with other people with the same goal that keeps me going.”

Spradley’s research includes collaborations with Alberto Giordano, Ph.D., a Texas State Geography Department professor with deep knowledge of Geographic Information Science (GIS). Together they have worked on studies related to spatial forensics, including one applying GIS data to human remains scattered by vultures, and another analyzing spatial trends of the mass disaster on the border.

“Our collaboration is relevant not only to our fields, but most importantly to furthering the human rights agenda,” says Giordano. “Together with our students, we are working towards the definition of what we call Humanitarian GIS, which we see as a bridge between geography and forensic anthropology. This can have a real impact beyond academia.”

Since joining Texas State University’s Anthropology Department in 2012, Spradley has helped the university become a forensic anthropology powerhouse that ranks among the top programs in the U.S. Along with her colleagues, Spradley helped develop the school’s Forensic Anthropology Center of Texas State (FACTS) and the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF), also known as the “body farm,” an outdoor human decomposition research laboratory that at 26 acres, is the largest in the world, and the only one exploring human decay as it unfolds in Texas and western states.

“I really wanted to work in a border state,” Spradley says. “And when you’re teaching forensic anthropology, a body farm is a big draw for students. You typically get really good applications to a program like that, so I knew Texas State would be a very special place to work. It was an exciting time to join the school.”

A Neanderthal’s leg bone sparked Spradley’s passion for forensic anthropology when she was an undergrad at the University of Arkansas. “I didn’t know what my major was going to be,” she says. “The professor held up that bone and said that a healed break in it implied that someone had cared for that individual or they would have died. I thought that was amazing.”

Spradley went on to earn her doctorate at the University of Tennessee. During her time there, she collected data in Pima County, Arizona, on forensic characteristics of Mexican and Central American people. That experience fueled her desire to work in a border state where she could apply her skills to marginalized populations.

Everyone has human rights, in life and in death. This is a humanitarian issue.

“It helps the international community, and it helps the families of the missing,” she says. “And in Texas, it helps counties reach compliance with state laws on how to handle and process unidentified human remains. As we establish relationships and gain the legal permissions to conduct these exhumations, it’s very much an educational process for these county officials, so that by the time we come into a county, exhume, and leave, you can see they’ve started to change their practices.”

One of Dr. Spradley’s immediate future projects is establishing a training program for justices of the peace that would be melded into their state-required education.

OpID teams venture to Brooks County cemeteries in South Texas to exhume human remains, usually found on the area’s expansive private ranches and then buried in unmarked areas of cemeteries. Though the exhumation work slowed due to the coronavirus, OpID continues geophysical surveys to delineate where remains are buried. “When we can travel and be close together again, we can go immediately and conduct exhumations,” she notes, adding that there are identified locations in Zapata, Cameron, and Maverick counties.

“Unfortunately, we’re going to be in Brooks County a long time,” Spradley adds. “There are still people buried there, but there are no records, so we’re still looking for them. Most people are never found.” Compounding the issue is the fact that more than 95 percent of land in Texas is privately owned, hampering access to places where people’s remains may lie and what happens to them, as ranchers and ranch hands might ignore the remains or simply bury them where they’re found. In places like Arizona, more than ninety percent of land near the border is public, facilitating recovery of the human remains.

More than 700 people’s remains have been found in 900,000-acre Brooks County over the past ten years. Since 2013, OpID has taken in the remains and personal effects of more than 306 people and made 41 positive identifications.

“Everyone has human rights, in life and in death,” adds Dr. Spradley. “This is a humanitarian issue. There are families that are continuing to live with the terror of not knowing what happened to their loved ones.”