of a water born illness that people should have known about in realtime. yeah, it s this disease called lactosupport row sis. it is caused by drinking water tainted with animal waste which countless folks were forced 0 to consume in all those months of broken pipes and powerless pumps. that s how had we sued for the documents, we didn t know there was either an outbreak or an epidemic that the government still has not acknowledged occurred in that magnitude. we ran these documents by a number of experts in this field and they were frankly stunned by the number of cases that were showing up and how fatal this disease was. reporter: our team also noticed that specific individuals who definitely died in the storm were not counted in the official toll. like jose, pepe sanchez. gentleman is at a home. he has a stroke. the person with him calls 911. 911 says we can t get to him in
related to hurricane maria, but again, that is an estimate. we have done investigations in the past that show we believe that last year the death toll could have been nine times and that s based on interviews with funeral homes and families and this is concrete evidence that will give us a better understanding of the actual death toll. poppy? as you know the governor told our anderson cooper a bit over a week ago there will be hell to pay if anything was withheld, talking about how much he wanted the transparency and now we ll get it because of this lawsuit. what about the families that you ve been talking to. the people on the ground as they learn this news? what are they saying to you? reporter: poppy, let me first address what you mentioned to the governor, and i reached out to the fortaleza, the governor s mansion and i wanted to ask specifically about that. in terms of the family, i talked to one family, the family of pepe sanchez, the first one we
conditions led to those deaths. could they be tied to hurricane maria? as you mentioned, we had to sue the government puerto rico to get access to this. the government said they wanted an extension, they wanted more time to redact social security numbers from those death certificates. now we have talked to some of the families that we have featured in our past reporting. pepe sanchez is one that i reached out to. when i told his wife that we now had access to these, said she hadoose bumps because she was so happy that we were going to get an opportunity to try to get to the bottom of what has really been a controversial death toll. she suspects that there will be more cases just like pepe s. as i mentioned off the top now, wolf, we dig. thank you so much, leyla for
secretary gave us his word he would look into them. to his credit he did look into several of them and in the case of pepe sanchez who died during hurricane maria, had a heart condition, had quite a bit of an attack and died when they called 911, help did not come because it wasn t available given the elements that came with the hurricane, that death has now been added to that number 64. i spoke with the family, the wife, in tears, said she now feels a sense of justice given that his case has been added and they are now qualified to get some kind of money to cover funeral expenses from fema. thanks to you, making a difference in puerto rico, appreciate your reporting. all right. under scrutiny because they spoke out. now employees of the epa say their e-mails are being monitored because they criticize the agency and white house
by one? funeral homes to begin with are not the person to tell us what the people die or not die of. reporter: he says families should be notifying the government if they believe hurricane maria is responsible for a death. loved ones, like pepe s wife, who tells us at the time the priority was not to make sure their loved one was counted in a statistic, rather to make sure he had a proper good-bye. they were married when she was 20 and she misses him. reporter: families trying to make sense of tragedy and a death toll. according to forensics, they sent people to funeral homes, to cemeteries, hospitals, to look into suspicious cases. and forensics says every time they found false claims, even called them rumors, you heard the secretary in our piece say that he s willing to look into