Border Bodies: The grim mysteries of Southern California

HABLAS ESPAÑOL? Lee la version en español de este articulo | READ MORE: How one man braves the desert to save lives | HOW TO HELP: 6 John Doe cases with strong clues | EVEN MORE: In his last moments, a migrant says goodbye | COLUMN: Showing the faces of the dead

CALEXICO, Calif. – The man lay face down in the desert, less than a mile north of the Mexican border. He had been crawling, dragging himself through the dirt, when he died.

A border patrol agent had been tracking a group of undocumented immigrants through the area when he stumbled upon the decomposing body. It had been lying there maybe a month, during which time temperatures had topped 108.

The dead man was short and thin, dressed in head-to-toe denim with a large white belt buckle, dark hiking shoes and Christmas socks. In his pocket, investigators found a few pesos, three phone cards and a receipt from the Don Juan Hotel, a cheap place to stay just across the border in Mexicali. The receipt listed a name – “Lucio Paulino” – but no one could be certain this was the dead man's real name.

The next day, authorities found another body. This time, a man was floating in the All-American Canal, a man-made river that runs through Southeast California like a moat along the border fence. A day later, they found a third body: A man slumped in the open desert, carrying a bus ticket from Mexico.

All three bodies were discovered during a single week in June 2000. Today, the details of these deaths are kept in a beige filing cabinet at the Imperial County Coroner’s Office labeled with a sticker: “John/Jane Doe.”

More than 450 unidentified bodies have been found in Imperial County since 1990, and authorities estimate that at least 90 percent are undocumented immigrants who died while crossing the border. The vast majority of the bodies are Latino men, but their countries of origin are unknown. Deaths like these are frightfully common along the entire border, but Imperial County is uniquely unequipped to handle the caseload. No other border county faces such a problematic combination of border crossings, deceptively deadly terrain and limited resources in its coroner's office, which is responsible for identifying the deceased. The coroner's office is only four people.

The number of unidentified bodies has fallen dramatically in Imperial County the past few years, mostly because migration corridors – and the migrant deaths – have shifted to Arizona and Texas. But hundreds of mysteries from the 1990s and the 2000s remain unsolved, symbolizing a crisis in which migrants risk death in the wilderness for a chance at life in America. Smugglers have built an industry on that desperation, demonstrating little concern for their human cargo.

Juventino Hernandez Lopez, 27, took the chance anyway.

In April, Lopez, a soft-spoken migrant from the Mexican beach town of Puerto Escondido, snuck across the border into Arizona. He paid a guide $500 up front and agreed to pay $3,000 once he reached Phoenix. His final destination was New York, where his brother had found work. Lopez walked into the desert with a backpack, a few cans of beans and water.

The journey did not go as planned. After a few days, Lopez ran out of supplies. His guide abandoned him when he became too weak to keep up. To survive, Lopez went onto farms and drank filthy water meant for livestock. When he couldn’t find farms, he drank his own urine.

“I thought about my mother,” he said. “If I had died in the desert the only person who would worry about me is my mother. I thought about her reporting me missing, looking for me while my body was in the desert.”

After seven days, Lopez was saved by the people he was trying to avoid. He stumbled across a border patrol checkpoint, turned himself in and was deported, ending up at a border shelter in Mexicali. The shelters are plastered with missing person posters, hung by families searching for relatives who crossed the border and lost contact.

“For more than a month we didn’t know anything," said Nancy Rico, a Mexican citizen whose brother, Natalio, vanished while crossing near Tijuana eight years ago. “It is very sad to know he was out there somewhere, dead.”

READ MORE: The Nameless Dead of Riverside County

Much like Lopez, Natalio hired a smuggler to guide him through the wilderness on the border, then was abandoned when he couldn’t keep up. He was missing for a month before the guide called his sister, saying Natalio had been found and could be sent home for $1,500. Rico wired the money, but never heard from the guide again. Her brother’s body was discovered several months later in the California wilderness.

The guide had left Natalio to die, then scammed his sister.

“The heart of those people is damaged, it’s rotten,” Rico said in Spanish. “I don’t know how to describe a person who is so messed up that they can hurt people this way.”

Natalio had depended on the guide because, like countless other undocumented immigrants, he believed he had a better chance of sneaking across the border if he crossed in the empty desert, away from roads and towns where he could be spotted.

At first glance, Imperial County appears perfect for that.

The county – which sits in California’s southeastern corner, between San Diego and Arizona – was founded in 1907 by ambitious farmers, who sought to cultivate the region’s vast, empty deserts. Today, aqueducts have transformed the county into one of America’s agricultural centers, but in the places where the water doesn’t flow, the land is still brown, barren and harsh. The county is the least populated in Southern California, with towns spread far apart.

Undocumented immigrants have crossed these empty spaces since the late 1990s, when the Border Patrol introduced “Operation Gatekeeper,” concentrating agents near population centers in the belief that migrants wouldn’t risk a long walk through the dangerous desert.

Border Patrol leaders described Gatekeeper as "prevention through deterrence," but knew the strategy would increase the likelihood of border deaths, according to a 2009 study by the American Civil Liberties Union. Within the first year, exposure and drowning replaced car accidents as the most common cause of border deaths, researchers found. Border agents started making fewer arrests, but finding more bodies.

“The (Border Patrol) genuinely thought the desert would work as a natural barrier,” said Juanita Molina, executive director of Humane Borders, an Arizona nonprofit. “They knew people would die, but they thought it would be only a few. They grossly underestimated the desperation of the people who would cross.”

MOBILE USERS: Click here to see the faces of migrants who died crossing the border

Editor's note: Why we decided to show faces of the dead

In California, Operation Gatekeeper fundamentally changed how the border was crossed. Migrants could no longer simply blitz the border in San Diego, so immigration shifted east into Imperial County, where a smaller number of agents were responsible for nearly 90 miles of mostly uninhabitable border lands.

Almost overnight, the county’s border was “overrun,” said Agent David Kim, assistant chief of patrol in the U.S. Custom's and Border Protection's El Centro Sector.

Migrants started crossing the border in Imperial County in greater numbers than ever before, but many weren’t ready for the harsh terrain. Deaths and rescues began to rise sharply. Between 1998 and 2001, border agents found more bodies in El Centro than anywhere else along the entire border. Agents had to focus on saving lives instead of stopping entry.

In 2000, the agency began installing desert rescue beacons, which give off a flashing light in the dark. Each beacon has a button that sends a rescue request straight to dispatch agents. El Centro also introduced BORSTAR, a specialized search and rescue team.

Today, the unit has eight agents. In May, they rescued four exhausted migrants who were lost in the mountains near Ocotillo without food or water. Earlier this month, they rescued another eight migrants who were stranded in the desert near Plaster City.

All of these migrants will likely be deported, but at least they survived.

“Obviously we are a law enforcement agency first and foremost," Kim said. “But anytime human life is at stake, the enforcement really becomes secondary. Our main purpose is to go out there and save lives.”

Jose Humberto Montalvan walked into the desert alone.

His plan was simple: Slip across the border through the Jacumba Wilderness, a remote mountainous stretch on the border of San Diego and Imperial counties. After five hours, Montalvan wasn’t entirely sure where he was, but he was pretty certain he had finally made it onto American soil.

But the victory was short. Montalvan had left his backpack behind so he wouldn’t look like a border crosser, and now his supplies were gone. The road ahead was long and dangerous. Montalvan had escaped the bloody, crime-ridden streets in his home country of Honduras, so he sure as hell didn't want to die here.

“I turned around because I didn’t have any water,” said Montalvan, who lives in a shelter in Mexicali. He's tried to cross the border several times, including his failed attempt last year. “I didn’t want to die.”

Montalvan was right to go back. Jacumba Wilderness is one of the most dangerous crossing points in Southern California. The only place where more migrants have died is the All-American Canal, which spans more than half of Imperial County. Migrants are misled into believing the mountains are easy to cross, and they underestimate the canal, which looks like a leisurely swim. These mistakes often prove fatal.

Depending on where they start, migrants who trek the Jacumba Wilderness have to hike about 5 to 10 miles before they reach Interstate 8, where some arrange for a waiting vehicle. Others hike beyond the interstate to avoid U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoints to the east and west.

The mountain path is steep and winding. Temperatures can be fatal in both summer and winter. Rattlesnakes are everywhere and bandits prey on the vulnerable. The far more common threat comes from the guides themselves.

Experts say guides in this area – like most migration corridors – are generally working for cartels. Many will leave their groups at any sign of law enforcement, said Kim.

“It’s just a numbers game for them,” Kim said. “I hate to put it this way but the smugglers almost see it as like a livestock commodity. They understand and they are OK with losing a certain portion of their commodity because they know the money will continue to roll in.”

Kim said border agents mostly patrol this area on horseback, but some remote corners of the wilderness might not see an agent for a week. Anyone who gets hurt or abandoned, and doesn’t have a way to signal for help, has a slim chance of surviving.

About 20 miles east of the Jacumba Wilderness is the end of the All-American Canal, which carries water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley. Hundreds of immigrants have drowned in the 80-mile aqueduct.

Generally, these victims are not strong enough to outswim the current or climb the steep banks at the canal’s edge. Their bodies are swept downstream until they snag on a grate or spillway. They are fished out by scuba divers like Gary Hatfield, an emergency responder with the Imperial Irrigation District, which manages the canal.

After more than a decade with the district, Hatfield has come to believe the canal’s most dangerous attribute is its deceptiveness.

“Standing on the bank, it looks like a slow moving river that you can swim across,” Hatfield said. “But the current underneath is moving extremely fast, and it doesn’t take very long for people to get extremely exhausted.”

In 2010, the irrigation district tried to make the canal safer by adding rescue buoys and exit ladders. They also posted signs and fliers calling the canal “Aguas Mortales,” or “Deadly Waters.” Drownings are down since then, but haven't stopped.

One of the most recent was on March 10, when border agents found a body on the canal banks east of Calexico. The man, who had two clowns and a marijuana leaf tattooed on his chest, remains unidentified.

Bodies like these are just the “canary in the coal mine” of border deaths, an invisible humanitarian crisis that does not get the attention it deserves, said Molina, of Humane Borders.

The border patrol has recorded more than 6,000 border deaths from 2000 to 2015 – including nearly 1,000 in California and more than 600 in Imperial County – but the agency does not make the locations and details of these deaths public. Trying to fill that gap, Humane Borders has mapped more than 2,100 Arizona migrant deaths since 2001, but the group's work stops at the state line, and no one publishes the same data in California, New Mexico or Texas.

“It is shocking to me that the federal government doesn’t take a more active role in acknowledging and preventing these deaths,” Molina said. “Why is it that these people have become dispensable?”

The mounting death toll is often lost in the American debate over immigration. Despite frequent focus on building a border wall during this year's presidential campaign, candidates have not held any substantive discussions on migrant deaths.

Most Americans remain unaware that so many die during border crossings, Molina said, and the immigrants themselves continue to hear a one-sided story that encourages them to journey into the desert. The smugglers who guide them are mostly agile young men who have a financial incentive to make the journey sound easier than it is.

“Migrants are being deceived. They are told the crossing is much easier than what they imagine, and people pay for that lack of information with their lives,” Molina said. “I don’t know about you, but I could not keep up with a 16-year-old running through the desert at night.”

Just after dawn on April 7, 2014, a canal worker spotted another body. A slender young man – maybe a boy – was floating face up in Briar Canal, a narrow offshoot of the All-American Canal.

A deputy coroner hooked the body with a rake, then pulled it onto shore.

The body in the water had no wallet and no identification. The deputy coroner ran the man’s fingerprints and DNA through a nationwide database, but got no match. He contacted the Mexican Consulate’s office, asking if any young men had recently gone missing, but found no answers. The coroner's office made fliers showing a sketch of the man, then posted them on Facebook and sent them to eight consulate offices in Central and South America.

“Ayuda! Identificame,” the fliers said. “Please help. Identify me.”

About a year later, the Mexican Consulate’s Office came back with a new lead. A man fitting the description of the canal body had just been reported missing. A new DNA test confirmed it: The body from Briar Canal was no longer a John Doe. He was Edgar Antonio Gomez Fernandez, 20, of Mexico.

“Ten years ago, he would have ended up in there,” said Sgt. Eric Frazier, a supervising deputy coroner in Imperial County, gesturing to a beige cabinet of John Doe cases. “There is no doubt about it.”

Today, the Imperial County coroner’s office points to the Briar Canal case, and others like it, as evidence that investigators have gotten much better at identifying migrants who've died. Frazier said investigators have better technology and training than they did in previous decades, when border bodies were far more likely to be left unidentified.

Border crossings complicate every aspect of the identification process, so many of the tactics that would easily identify an American citizen don’t work on John Does in Imperial County.

Many of the bodies found in the desert carry no identification. Most are alone and far from home, with no clues pointing to friends and families. Databases for fingerprints and DNA don’t reach into Mexico or South America. There is no searchable database for dental records.

To overcome these limitations, the coroner’s office shares information with Mexican police and foreign consulates. Facebook, which knows no borders, has become a useful tool. And, investigators routinely upload case files to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUS, an online database that allows the public to review unsolved cases in English and Spanish.

A concentrated effort to upload files to NamUS began in 2014. Since then, more than 310 cases have been added, but many more need to be submitted. New cases take priority over the task of uploading old files, Frazier said.

“With our limited staffing we can barely handle what we have now,” Frazier said. “What we need are deputies who can go back.”

Like many rural counties, Imperial doesn't have the money to fund a large coroner's office. The county is nearly as big as Connecticut, but it operates on $250 million a year, less than the annual budget of the city of Hartford.

As a result, the county is less equipped to identify migrants than its neighbors, which either have more staff or fewer deaths. For example, to the west is San Diego County, which has a population of more than 3 million and a medical examiner’s office with 55 employees. To the east is Yuma County, Arizona, which has a similarly small medical examiner’s office, but significantly fewer border deaths. The rest of the Arizona border is covered by the Pima County Medical Examiner, which also faces a border death crisis, but has a staff of about 30.

In recent years, tighter budgets have further limited how Imperial County handles unidentified remains.

For years, unidentified and unclaimed bodies were buried in a potter’s field behind Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, where small wooden crosses mark graves in a dirt field beyond a locked gate.

In 2011, the county started cremating these bodies and spreading the ashes off the coast of San Diego. Cremation is half the price of burial, said Norma Saikhon, Imperial County's public administrator.

Somewhere in the Terrace Park Cemetery is the body of John Doe — the one from the beginning of this story — who died crawling through the dust in Calexico in 2000. He was found with a Mexicali hotel receipt in his pocket, the best clue to his identity.

Authorities followed the lead to Hotel Don Juan. Staff at the hotel remembered the man, but they didn’t know who he was. They still don’t.

“He stayed in Room 13,” said Pablo Martinez, the hotel’s longtime manager. “I remember because of the number.”

Room 13 was bad luck, so Martinez converted it into storage. Other than that, Hotel Don Juan hasn't changed all that much in the past 16 years. Most of the customers are Central American migrants, weary from their travels through Mexico, who stay for a few days before they attempt to cross into the United States.

Some make it across the border, then settle into new lives. Others are caught by border agents, then deported.

A few walk into the desert and never come back.

Check out the rest of our Border Bodies series here:

• Angels of the Desert: How one man sacrifices to rescue migrants stranded along the border
• Those left behind: The story of a family that lost two men during the journey to America
• Where hope remains: Read about six border body cases with promising clues
• Faces of the dead: Check out our column on why we decided to publish the faces of deceased migrants

Public Safety Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at 760 778 4642 or at brett.kelman@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.

Immigration Reporter Gustavo Solis can be reached at 760 778 6443 or by email at gustavo.solis@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @journogoose.