Story and photos by J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

W hen the bone chip arrived from Arizona, Lori Baker suited up and entered the sealed inner sanctum of her laboratory at Baylor University.

Dr. Lori Baker, 37, began her work helping identify the remains of illegal immigrants on a volunteer basis in 2003 and now performs those duties by contract with the Mexican government. Officials with the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson, Ariz., say Baker's work is making a dent in their backlog of more than 250 unidentified bodies. (Jerry Larson photo/Waco Tribune-Herald)

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.

MORE

Two among hundreds: Teenagers' dreams die in Arizona desert

→ Mitochrondrial DNA and forensics: a primer

MULTIMEDIA

Videos → Watch this family's story

Slide shows → An in-depth look at Tehuacán

• Downtown Tehuacán, Mexico
• Maquiladoras bring prosperity
• With growth, poverty in Tehuacán
• One family's journey across the Arizona desert
• Parents grieve for their children

Audio slide show

• Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

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.”

BROKEN PROMISE LAND

Part 3 of 4

Running through Wednesday, this series will explore the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

SUNDAY: Part 1 Hoping to find employment in the United States, two cousins and a father from Tehuacán, Mexico, cross the Arizona desert, where their dream threatens to turn deadly.

MONDAY: Part 2 In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s pursuit of illegal immigrants is a cat-and-mouse game where the cat often saves the mouse. As border enforcement increases elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, so do migrant deaths in southern Arizona. Critics say the effort to curb border crossings isn’t working.

TODAY: Part 3 As Arizona morgues fill up with unidentified bodies found in the desert, a Baylor University scientist uses DNA to help crack some of the toughest cases.

MORE: Two among hundreds: Teenagers' dreams die in Arizona desert

WEDNESDAY: Part 4 A family in Tehuacán, Mexico, deals with the emotional aftermath of a disastrous border crossing, all while offering a south-of-the-border perspective on the personal and economic motives that cause Mexicans to risk their lives in the Arizona deserts.

About this series

• Audio slide show → Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

This project examining the perilous crossings of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border was made possible by a World Affairs Journalism Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C.

For three weeks last summer, Tribune-Herald staff writer J.B. Smith traveled to three towns in Mexico to interview families of dead illegal immigrants identified in Waco by Baylor University forensic DNA scientist Lori Baker.

He also spent five days in September visiting southern Arizona, where all of those immigrants died. He traveled into the desert with Border Patrol agents and volunteers from a locally based humanitarian group and visited the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Smith continued his research well into December, conducting interviews with anti-illegal immigration activists and policy-makers, including the head of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Beginning today and running through Wednesday, this series explores the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

Try as she might to contain her empathy for these families, helping them is a cause that is consuming Lori Baker’s life.

Her work identifying dead migrants began as volunteer work in 2003, a sideline to a promising career as a mitochondrial DNA researcher and professor.

Then, in 2005, she won a contract with the Mexican government to identify bodies of Mexican nationals found in Arizona. This year, her contract of $325,000 requires her to analyze 200 bone samples from cadavers and 50 blood samples from possible relatives.

The digital analyses of the DNA samples are loaded into a database maintained by the Mexican government. The computer then makes the match.

So far, more than 50 bodies have been positively identified through Baker’s work. Most are cases like Rosario’s, a matter of confirming a relationship. But Baker says she recently made some “blind matches” between families and previously unidentified bodies.

Medical authorities in Arizona say her work is helping them make a dent in their backlog of more than 250 unidentified cadavers.

To do so, Baker has put teaching and most other research on hold with Baylor’s full support. She has battled lupus and given birth but kept working almost continuously. She often stays at the lab until 2 a.m. working on cases while her husband, Baylor computer science professor Erich Baker, takes care of their infant and toddler.

Lately, she has been working to identify illegal immigrants killed in last fall’s San Diego wildfires.

“I had a father call me wanting information on his daughter, who was 24,” she says. “We hadn’t even received the samples yet. But when you get a call like that, you know we can’t not work around the clock getting help for these people.”

* * *

This case seemed clear enough. Rosario Hernandez was the name on the birth certificate found with the body. The body was the right height and weight. The autopsy estimated the boy was about 16, which fit.

Why couldn’t the body be sent home to the family?

Two obstacles stood in the way.

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.

Faustino Francisco Galvan, 38, at home in Tehuacán, Mexico, with his granddaughter in August 2007, learned that his initial reluctance to be forthright with the Mexican Consulate about his illegal entry into the United States in May 2006 may have unintentionally contributed to the deaths of his 13-year-old son, Eloy, and his 16-year-old nephew, Rosario.

* * *

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.

Mitochondrial DNA and forensics: A primer

What is mitochondrial DNA, and how is it different from regular DNA?

It’s a double-helix molecule containing chemical codes, located in mitochondria — tiny cell structures responsible for energy production. Unlike the DNA in the cell nucleus, mitochondrial DNA — mtDNA, for short — is not bundled into chromosomes but forms a ring. It has a specialized function: directing the creation of enzymes and proteins. While nuclear DNA is a mixture of your mom and dad’s genetic material, mtDNA is passed along only on your mother’s side.

Why is mitochondrial DNA useful for forensics?

Scott Fagner illustration/Waco Tribune-Herald

Two reasons. First, mtDNA is passed along largely unchanged from mother to offspring. That means your mtDNA resembles the mtDNA not only of your mother but your mother’s matrilineal relatives: for example, her other children, her mother, her siblings and her sisters’ children. A sample from any of those relatives could be compared with your mtDNA to identify you as a relative of your mother. (It can’t prove exactly how you are related, though.) Second, mtDNA samples can be collected from decayed tissue, including bones. It can even be extracted from Ice Age mammoth bones.

How is mtDNA extracted from bone?

The scientist slices off a quarter of a gram of bone, crushes it and uses chemicals to remove proteins and minerals. She adds silica particles that bind to the DNA and separate it from the other substances.

So little DNA exists in bone that it is necessary to make copies for analysis. The mtDNA is targeted with the aid of chemicals.  A heating and cooling process is used to separate the double strands and a chemical process then makes copies of specific fragments.

How do you analyze the mtDNA once it’s extracted?

The fragments are dyed and sorted by length through electrophoresis, which involves an electrified gel that causes the fragments to move at different speeds. A certain length indicates that a fragment is the “hypervariable region” (see diagram), a distinctive segment of the mtDNA ring that is best used for identifying an individual.

Fluorescent dyes are used to mark the four chemical components of the DNA code, and the segment is ready for sequencing. An electronic sequencer uses a laser to read these four components as the letters G, C, A and T, in various combinations. That stream of letters is compared with a generic human mtDNA code to look for distinctive patterns. If those patterns match the patterns from another person’s sample, then the two people are related.

— J.B. Smith

* * *

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.

Rosario (left), Eloy

THE STORY SO FAR

May 13, 2006: A group leaves Tehuacán, Mexico, on a journey into the U.S. Among them: Faustino Francisco Galvan; his 13-year-old son, Eloy; his 16-year-old nephew, Rosario; Faustino’s sister, Clara; and Clara’s friend, Elisa.

May 16: The group crosses into Arizona illegally.

May 18: Water runs low and Faustino is overcome by heat.

May 19: Faustino, Clara and Elisa are abandoned by the others but rescued that night by the Border Patrol. A day later, Faustino is questioned by the Mexican Consulate but doesn’t mention the group’s other members.

May 22: The body of a teenager is found in Ironwood Forest National Monument; a birth certificate identifies him as Rosario Hernandez.

May 26: An autopsy is performed on the teenager. Mexican officials search for the boy’s relatives.

May 27: A Minuteman volunteer finds the remains of another teenage boy near the site of the first body at Ironwood Forest.

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.”

Another skeleton awaits identification in the morgue of the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson. Last year, more than 200 migrant bodies were found in Arizona.

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.

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

757-5752