FALFURRIAS — Remains of two dozen of unidentified migrants were found last week stacked on top of each other, some buried two- to four-feet deep in nothing but plastic bags.
Many of the bodies found still intact had no signs of an autopsy being performed and no documentation from the county or the cemetery available to help identify them, said Kate Spradley, associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University.
“One definition of a mass disaster is if you have more deaths than you have resources to handle; that happens (in South Texas) every month,” Spradley said.
“The counties need the budget to send the bodies for an autopsy or anthropology and they need to ensure that DNA is taken,” she added. “And if they are going to bury them, the (justice of the peace) is required by law to record where they are buried, and nobody is doing that.”
This month anthropologists spent 11 days unearthing the bodies and remains of 24 unidentified migrants. They started Jan. 3 and packed up last Wednesday, uncertain if they found everyone that has been buried here without the proper DNA testing.
The two forensic teams made up mostly of staff and graduate students from Texas State University and the University of Indianapolis paid their own way to South Texas in order to be a part of Operation Identification which started in 2013.
OpID aims to facilitate the identification and repatriation of unidentified migrant remains here through community outreach, forensic anthropological analysis, and collaboration with governmental and non-governmental organizations.
“Every single person deserves to have a name and have the opportunity to be claimed by family and loved ones,” said Krystle Lewis, 30, a second-year graduate student at TSU. “By being a part of this, I’ve also learned that there are people out there that don’t care, so it’s nice to be a part of a program where we do care.”
This is the third time anthropology students from Baylor, Texas State and the UIndy have taken part in the exhumations. The first time was in May 2013 when the so-called mass graves were discovered, bringing national attention to the number of migrant deaths in Brooks County and South Texas.
The forensic teams returned the following year and had not been back since. It took them nearly three years to process the bodies or remains they had already exhumed.
There are about 200 migrant remains at the TSU anthropology lab that students and other forensic volunteers have extracted DNA from, de-fleshed, categorized along with any personal belongings recovered, and sent to the National Institute of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) for possible matches.
Because of the lengthy process and all the parties involved in identification and repatriation, only four of the 20 remains identified since 2013 have been returned to family members in their home countries, according to Spradley who oversees the OpID project at TSU’s anthropology department.
Spradley plans to expand their efforts beyond Falfurrias because she said there are many counties across South Texas where this is happening, but lack of funding on their side also has her uncertain of when they will return.
“We know that these are somebody’s family member and they walked away and never came back and so we’re here to help the people who died and help their families understand what happened,” Spradley said. “But our grant money will be exhausted this year and we need funding to continue our work.”
This time the teams unearthed remains from 10 burial sites including the original 2013 site where more than 60 remains were exhumed by the first set of volunteer students led by Dr. Lori Baker from Baylor University and Dr. Krista Latham, associate professor at UIndy’s departments of biology and anthropology.
Latham, who has been here for all three field operations, explained they have learned many lessons that helped them better prepare each time, but they’ve also learned to expect the unexpected.
“I think we learned two big lessons this year; One is that there are much smaller pieces of land that hold the unidentified migrants and that long-term knowledge of the cemetery is more important than anything else,” Latham said.
“We had several individuals come by, including a groundskeeper who cuts the grass here, that have pointed out areas where additional migrants were buried that we had no idea those existed,” she added. “The community and those individuals that are familiar with the cemetery have been extremely helpful in us finding those burials.”
Instead of coming down during the late spring or summer this time, the teams came in the winter when the weather permits them to work longer hours. They also brought ground penetrating radar to help them survey the sites and get an idea of the burials before digging. They’ve also brought a field lab to help inspect and mark the remains before transporting them to TSU for inventory and DNA testing.
On Feb. 20, 2013, a letter signed by more than 30 organizations, including the Texas Civil Rights Project and Houston Unido, was delivered to Brooks County urging that DNA samples be taken from all unidentified remains in compliance with state law.
According to the Texas Code of Criminal Procedures, DNA samples must be collected from unidentified remains to be submitted to the University of North Texas Health Science Center for inclusion in the NIJ database. Sometimes DNA is the only way missing people and unidentified remains are matched, but according to NamUs Case Management and Communications Director J. Todd Mathews, the national DNA program will be discontinued after this grant cycle.
“We do have a forensic dentistry and a fingerprint unit at NamUs at UNT and they will continue, so we are facing a shift to other means of identification,” Mathews said. “But when you have unidentified remains and they’re skeletal you’re not going to get fingerprints.
“And if you have a missing person but nobody knows where they went to the dentist, you’re not going to get those dental records,” he added. “DNA is kind of like the catch all, if you have a bone and you have a relative you can compare.”
Grant funding for TSU is also up in the air right now making hard for the forensic team to continue their efforts in identifying the remains they’ve exhumed and move on to other counties and cemeteries where migrants might still be buried as Jane Doe or John Doe with no chance of ever getting their true names back.
