Immigrants filling morgues

BLANDING — The foreigner is buried in a small-town cemetery, against a barbed-wire fence in an unmarked plot set aside for poor people.

He might be Mexican. He might be Guatemalan. But he's simply called No. 8, a man with no name because his identity is still unknown a year after he was killed in a car wreck with seven other illegal immigrants in southeastern Utah.

"This is the Garden of Eden of Utah down here," said Philip Palmer, coordinator at Blanding City Cemetery, referring to the mountain peaks in four states visible from the graveyard. "It's a good place to put him."

More than 2,000 illegal immigrants have died in the Southwest since 2002, and many are nameless in death. They are buried as anonymous victims of heat stroke, car crashes or other calamities.

They typically carry no ID, just the clothes on their backs and dreams of a life better than the ones they left behind.

"They're filling our morgues," said Todd Matthews of Livingston, Tenn., who works for the Doe Network, a volunteer organization that helps law enforcement with unidentified remains.

More than half of the border-crossing deaths in the Southwest since 2002 have occurred in Arizona's Pima County, which includes Tucson, on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist in Tucson, said a quarter of the victims there lack names. Many remains are little more than bleached bones after a few days in the sun, making them almost impossible to identify.

"They die in the middle of nowhere," Anderson said. "Most Americans die in their car, in their house, or with somebody they know."

In the case of No. 8, he apparently died in Utah among strangers.

It's unknown when or how he entered the country. But on the night of April 15, 2007, he piled into a sport utility vehicle in Phoenix, joining 13 other people for a trip to St. Louis.

They crossed the Arizona-Utah state line at 3:30 a.m. At some point, the driver drifted out of his lane, overcorrected and lost control of the vehicle, sending it spinning onto its side.

The SUV rolled several times, and seven passengers were thrown from it. Eight people, all illegal immigrants, were killed.