As the nation enters a third year under the threat of COVID-19, Arizona medical examiners say they are struggling to keep up with rising caseloads driven largely by rising deaths from the virus at a time when there is a shortage in forensic pathologists.
Arizona PBS
July 13, 2021
Three wooden crosses mark the location where the remains of a family were found near Arivaca in April. They were among a record-setting 127 migrant remains recovered in the Arizona desert in the first six months of this year. (File photo by Grace Oldham/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
Remains recovered in the desert are itemized in the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, where many are marked “unidentified.” Medical examiners cannot always determine a cause of death, but said it is often attributed to exposure. (File photo by Raphael Romero Ruiz/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
Boxes containing unidentified remains are stacked in a hallway in the back of the medical examiner’s office in this March photo. Pima County Chief Medical Examiner Gregory Hess said the office has outgrown its space and is planning for a new building. (File photo by Raphael Romero Ruiz/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
Advertisement: “You can’t even describe what we are doing as a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” Jakubal said. He said a long history of U.S. policies in Latin America has contributed to the reasons migrants are risking their lives to trek for days through harsh terrain in hopes of finding better lives in the U.S. In other words, Jakubal said, “what’s going on at the border now is like a symptom on top of a symptom on top of a symptom of the deeper problem.”
A shift in policy Doug Ruopp, a veteran volunteer with the migrant aid group Humane Borders, remembers a time before people started to die at striking rates in the Sonoran Desert. He moved to Tucson from New England in the late 1990s to become a bilingual teacher. Back then, the border crossings he heard about were different.