Appendix on Methods

Abstract

This manual emerges from a series of questions from a community that has been affected by the rising toll of UBC deaths. It is a response to the very particular context of the thousands of UBCs who have died since the mid-1990s, which also represents a disaster-like situation for local officials and smaller jurisdictions constituting the majority of this region. This is disaster-like due to the fact that local authorities have not been accustomed or equipped (in terms of infrastructure, finances or training) to deal with this dramatic rise in unknown and decayed human remains in their jurisdictions [52]. Pima County in Arizona has been one of the few jurisdictions to begin to count the UBC dead and unidentified, and alone, they have tallied over 2,000 individuals since the year 2000 [4][9]. The circumstances surrounding UBC deaths are complicated by the fact that many UBCs travel anonymously or under pseudonyms, cannot be identified by common death investigation techniques such as questioning friends and family – often because these people are foreign and/or unknown – or by standard post-mortem treatment accorded to most deaths. This is because UBC remains are often found highly decayed from prolonged exposure to the elements in the remote wilderness settings through which migrants travel. In these circumstances, a sustained process of random and disorganized response techniques based on locally available (insufficient) money, infrastructure and training has meant that for more than a decade, UBCs have been systematically subject to incomplete or uneven investigation, leaving no comprehensive statement about the number of UBC dead nor the number left unidentified. As evident in Figure 18, of the 18 counties at which multiple interviews were conducted, many county officials gave conflicting answers regarding basic aspects of which county offices were involved in given aspects of a body's itinerary, from discovery to release. Officials involved in death investigations are cognizant of the lack of standardization and oversight. Therefore, our team focused on collecting the local knowledge of procedures and protocols from each county jurisdiction. Figure 18: Of the 18 counties in which multiple interviews were conducted, officials occasionally gave conflicting reports of the protocols involved in given stages of a body's itinerary. This chart represents a selection of scenarios for which this conflicted reporting occurred. Values represent percent of 18 counties for which this was the case.