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County to start cremating crossers

The pauper's cemetery is unremarkable. A wind blows dirt over the framed white paper that marks the grave of John Doe No. 9, dead three years. But the cemetery's boundaries, marked by strips of fresh concrete, are widening as more illegal entrants die in Southern Arizona. For Pima County, they represent a grim reality: There's no more room to bury them. Using a state law that became effective last October, Pima County is going to begin cremating the remains of dead illegal border crossers it cannot identify, said county official Anita Royal. "Look at how much space we have left here," said the public fiduciary, waving her arm at a narrow strip of land the county is buying on the Evergreen Mortuary grounds to accommodate more of the unidentified dead. It's not just for dead illegal entrants; John or Jane Doe are names used to identify anybody in the county who has died but has no name to take with them to the grave. But in Pima County, 41 of the unidentified dead last year are believed to have been illegal border crossers, said Pima County Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Parks. So far this year, 12 suspected illegal entrants have gone unidentified, despite the efforts of forensic anthropologists who use everything from the person's teeth patterns and tattoos to extensive assistance from the Mexican Consulate to identify the people. This year, deaths are already at a record high. Fourteen illegal border crossers died across Southern Arizona since Friday, caught in the desert when temperatures topped 105 degrees. The most recent was found about 9 p.m. Tuesday night on Federal Route 34, said Tohono O'odham Police Chief Richard Saunders. That person's death pushed the number of dead illegal border crossers to 103 in Southern Arizona with 88 of those found in the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector, according to an Arizona Daily Star compilation of county medical examiner records. Last year, 221 illegal border crossers were found dead in Arizona. The state cremation law is simple, instructing counties that they have the option to cremate unclaimed bodies, Royal said. Pima County is taking the state up on that only after exhaustive searches for a name or a family have been completed, she said. A search like that takes nine to twelve months, she said. "We look and look and look. We try to identify that person so that we can find loved ones," she said. The county is achingly aware of the public-relations perception the cremations will give but says it has no choice. The decision to cremate will have nothing to do with the person's country of origin, said Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry. But as it stands, the United States doesn't pay anything toward burial of remains, he said. The Mexican consul in Tucson, Juan Calderón Jaimes, did not return phone calls seeking comment. Instead, he responded through a spokeswoman that he had not received any information about Pima County's cremation plans. Cremation instead of burial is expected to save the county money since the cheapest burial costs $835 while the most basic cremation costs $475 at Evergreen Mortuary, which provides the service for the county, Royal said. The bigger issue is the lack of room at the nearly 100-year-old pauper's cemetery, where coffins are stored in concrete vaults and stacked one atop the other in an effort to save space in the cemetery. Still, "we continue to increase the size of it," she said. Eleven body parts from persons unknown have already been cremated this year, she noted. Even as the county is planning the logistics of cremation, critics responded with frustration that the deaths had come to this. "Now to suggest that we're simply going to cremate these people is sending a signal to Mexico that the lives of these people aren't worth as much," said Erica Dahl-Bredine, a manager for Catholic Relief Services Mexico Program in Tucson. Cremation is an acceptable Catholic practice and is growing in Mexico, says the Rev. Ricardo Elford, a member of the Redemptorist Order, who works with immigrants in South Tucson. But many illegal border crossers come here from southern Mexico, where the more traditional burials occur, he said. "They would perhaps come to understand that cremation is more widely accepted than it used to be both in the church and culturally." The sad part is that so many have died, there's no room to bury them, he said. "It seems to me that the idea of that many people dying is a sign of what a horrible situation you're dealing with," Elford said. The county is spending $110,000 to buy another strip of the North Oracle Road cemetery to bury more people who couldn't afford to be buried on their own. With that will come a columbarium that will store the urns of 2,000 people, Royal said. Each urn will be stored in a small cubicle with a tag indicating what the Medical Examiner's Office knows about the body in case somebody, someday, wishes to recover the person, she said. "It's a cheap version of the Vietnam Wall in D.C.," Royal said. By the numbers ● There have been 103 dead illegal entrants in Arizona since Oct. 1.