The Remains

Christian Gonzalez grew up riding ATVs, ran cross-country in high school, and spoke English without an accent. So what was he doing in the middle of a deadly desert, risking his life to return to the American town he called home? Forensic scientists in south Texas want to give his family— and hundreds of others—some answers.

- Bronwen Dickey

I. CASE #0383

Case #0383 was pulled from a plywood box by the gloved hands of three researchers wearing white Tyvek suits and medical masks. It was a May morning, and the air was damp and heavy under a hot iron of clouds. The rest of the team moved quickly around them, before the sandy soil could collapse the hole. Grasping the corners of his white body bag, they lifted the man’s crumpled form to the surface, where a new bag, a clean white sheet to cover it, and a small bouquet of flowers waited. The sound of the long zipper mixed with the scuff of boots in the dry dirt and the steady inhaling and exhaling of the workers in the heat, the only other sounds in the Sacred Heart Burial Park in Falfurrias, Texas, southwest of Corpus Christi, eighty miles north of the border between the United States and Mexico.

This work, of exhuming the unnamed, was being carried out by two forensic anthropologists and their students, who had traveled to this cemetery from two universities, Baylor, in Waco, Texas, and the University of Indianapolis. After placing #0383 in the new bag, several of the students walked him to a staging area. There, a member of the Brooks County Sheriff’s Department hoisted him into a refrigerated trailer, where he would be safe until he was driven out of the burial ground and into a temporary holding facility two miles away.

The plywood box containing the remains of Case #0383 had been oriented east to west next to those of five others—one female, four males—in a long, shallow trench near the back of the cemetery. Based on a few scattered metal markers (“Unknown Male,” “Unknown Female”) and the memories of the cemetery’s groundskeepers, who pointed out places they believed migrants were buried, the forensics team planned to do perhaps a dozen exhumations.