By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Val Verde County has begun storing the bodies of immigrants it can no longer transport to Webb County for autopsies.
Val Verde County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr. confirmed the county is using a refrigerated storage unit purchased during the COVID-19 pandemic to store the bodies.
“As we’ve said, the sheriff received communication from our medical examiner in Laredo about this a couple of weeks ago. The bottom line is that everyone the medical examiner’s office serves, all the counties from here to Laredo, are in the same boat,” Owens told the 830 Times in a recent interview.
The Webb County Medical Examiner’s Office has notified the counties it serves that, effective immediately, it will no longer accept for autopsies the bodies of immigrants believed to have died while illegally entering the country.
Owens said county officials have met with representatives of the Mexico and Guatemala consulates in Del Rio to advise them of the situation.
“We’ve let them know that the way we are going to be addressing this is that the recovered bodies will be refrigerated, and the county has set up a location to be able to put remains in until we can send them to the medical examiner’s officer for an autopsy or until the individuals are identified through DNA or by what the deceased person had on them at the time they were found,” Owens said.
He said the remains would be stored until they can be sent to the medical examiner’s office.
“It’s a refrigerated unit that we brought in when we had a lot of individuals who were dying from COVID,” Owens said as he described the unit that will be used to hold the immigrant bodies.
The county judge declined to give the location of the refrigerated unit.
“I’d rather not say, as we don’t want to draw a lot of attention to the place,” Owens said.
He said county officials will check the refrigerated unit every day and should the unit fail or become inoperable, “we have plans in place, and we will make other arrangements.”
Owens said the refrigerated unit had never been used until last week, when the sheriff’s office recovered a dead body from the Rio Grande.
Val Verde County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Gina Garcia, who heads the sheriff’s office criminal investigations division, said Border Patrol agents contacted the sheriff’s office about 9 a.m. on Sept. 12 about a body that had been discovered in the Rio Grande about 16 miles west of its confluence with the Pecos River.
“This was a male subject who was found in the river,” Garcia said, noting no identification was found on the body, and the body displayed no obvious signs of foul play.
Owens said county officials have told consular officials here they would try to gather as much information as they can from the bodies that are found and recovered.
“We want to gather as much information as possible that will assist in identifying these individuals – what they’re wearing, where they were found – so we can give the consulates as much as we can to get to a family member or someone who might have reported these individuals as missing,” Owens said.
The county judge said he doesn’t know when the moratorium on shipping immigrants’ bodies to Laredo for autopsy may end.
“They have told us that they would continue to accept the bodies of our citizens, but they have not given us any date on when we can start sending immigrant bodies again. At the time the medical examiner sent the email to the sheriff, they said they had something like 200 immigrant bodies in a storage facility there waiting to be autopsied, so we don’t know, just until further notice,” Owens said.
“Right now, this is just the card that we’ve been dealt,” he added.
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