Newswise — So many undocumented migrants are turning up dead in rural Brooks County, Texas, that the local cemetery is running out of space for them.
University of Indianapolis forensic anthropologist Krista Latham and four graduate students will be there next week, exhuming remains as part of a humanitarian effort to bring closure to grieving families.
Near the small town of Falfurrias, barely an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, 129 bodies or sets of skeletal remains were found in 2012 alone. The location suggests that the migrants, left to their own devices by smugglers paid to deliver them safely, might be trying to reach a nearby U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint and be sent back home rather than die in the countryside.
“That’s where people are running out of water, running out of food,” says Latham, an assistant professor in UIndy’s Departments of Biology and Anthropology. “A lot of them are women and children who are just coming here for a better life.” Some are from Asian countries, she noted.
Latham has more than 10 years of experience in locating burial sites, exhuming graves and analyzing skeletal remains to determine sex, age, height, and other factors that can assist in identification. She directs UIndy’s Molecular Anthropology Laboratory and also works on human-remains cases in UIndy’s Archeology & Forensics Laboratory.
She and her uniquely qualified students were called to Texas by Associate Professor Lori Baker of Baylor University, who has been involved in the missing migrant issue for a decade. Baker is director of Reuniting Families, a nonprofit program that coordinates with authorities on both sides of the border to identify and repatriate the remains of the missing. The all-volunteer effort is necessitated by the fact that the communities where bodies are found typically lack the manpower, expertise and funding to handle the growing number of cases.
The four UIndy students, all pursuing master’s degrees in human biology, are Jessica Campbell of LaFarge, Wis.; Erica Christensen of Indianapolis; Justin Maiers of Lapeer, Mich.; and Ryan Strand of Irving, Texas. Their goal is to exhume 59 sets of remains – often while wearing protective gear in the southern heat – and to prepare them for cleaning, profiling and storage while the project awaits a grant to fund costly DNA analysis.
The trip is a remarkable learning and service opportunity for the students, Latham says. But sadly for the victims and their families, the grim trend is likely to continue. She plans to continue taking student teams to similarly affected communities in future years to conduct further exhumations and analysis.
“I see this as a long-term mission,” she says. “It’s a crisis at this point, and I think it’s going to get worse.”
RSS