The body count since 2014 stands at nine at one ranch, 17 at another and 31 at a third.
In South Texas, the number of deaths has overwhelmed some local officials and made the grisly discovery of decomposing bodies a commonplace occurrence. Hundreds of immigrants have died crossing the border in Texas in recent years, and hundreds of others have died in the three other states that share a border with Mexico - Arizona, California and New Mexico. The collection in San Marcos represents only a fraction of the total deaths. CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times Gocha, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Center, at a facility in San Marcos, Tex., where remains of unidentified migrants are put into body bags and left to decompose naturally. “The idea is to figure out who they are, and give them their name back.” Gocha, a forensic anthropologist with Operation Identification, a project at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Center that analyzes the remains and personal items of the immigrants to help identify them. “When we get them, we assign them a case number because we have to have a way of tracking cases, but no one deserves to be just a number,” said Timothy P. Even as the number of people caught trying to illegally enter the United States from Mexico has dropped in recent months, the bodies remain a constant, grim backdrop to the national debate over immigration. Most died from dehydration, heatstroke or hypothermia. The belongings are part of a border-crossers’ morgue at a Texas State University lab here - an inventoried collection of more than 2,000 objects and 212 bodies, the vast majority unidentified.Īll 212 were undocumented immigrants who died in Texas trying to evade Border Patrol checkpoints by walking across the rugged terrain.
One side of the grain read Sara, and the other read Rigo. Case 0377 kept a single grain of rice inside a hollow cross. Case 0519 carried Psalms and Revelation, torn from a Spanish Bible. Case 0469 was found with a bracelet, a simple green ribbon tied in a knot. Case 0435 died more than a mile from the nearest road, with an unscuffed MacGregor baseball in his backpack.
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