‘Making a match is incredibly satisfying … until you have to inform the family’ | Amnesty International
‘Making a match is incredibly satisfying … until you have to inform the family’ | Amnesty International:
A scar, a tattoo, broken bone, a toothbrush kept in a small bag, a set of teeth.
These are the some of the clues anthropologist Robin Reineke looks out for every time she is faced with a set of human remains of one of the hundreds of people who die every year while attempting to cross the Arizona desert.
Robin is part of the “Missing migrants project”, a team that works at the Pima County Morgue in Arizona.
Their job is to try to identify the corpses of the hundreds of men and women who perish each year in their search for a better life in the USA. The task is to match the remains with thousands of reports of missing people.
The office currently houses the remains of 800 unidentified individuals, as well as reports about 1,500 missing people. Most of them come from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, amongst other countries.
