The quest to know the man who would go to his grave without a name

The Star Ledger, August 31, 2008

Two men in black suits bowed their heads over a freshly dug grave that would soon hold the remains of a man they never knew, whose name they’d never learn.

They stood alone in the August sun, the only people on earth marking the man’s passing.

One of them recited a quick prayer, and the service was over. The men from Eternity Funeral Services climbed into a white hearse and drove away.

A crew of cemetery workmen, who’d been waiting under a tree with their caps off, lowered a sealed metal box into the grave. Inside the box were the man’s bones, found in an abandoned lot in Newark eight months earlier. On the lid, someone had written “0708-0151.”

The man’s identity was never discovered, but the search continues.

New Jersey authorities are trying to identify 278 human remains dating to the early 1970s, using DNA samples and other modern evidence-gathering techniques along with traditional methods such as advertising in newspapers and poring over missing-persons reports.

Each case involves a rotating cast of investigators from local and state agencies who juggle heavy workloads in a nonstop effort to piece together the identities of people who died anonymously. The list is always growing; last year, there were 19 unidentified remains found in New Jersey, 10 of which turned up in Newark.

When the doctors, detectives and scientists have exhausted every possible angle, they hand the bodies to county welfare officials, who arrange for burials. Rather than ending up in a potter’s field, the bodies are usually buried in a remote section of a large private cemetery, marked with the case number and little else. Even then, their cases remain open.

“It’s really sad and not that unusual,” said Gina Hart, a forensic anthropologist and investigator at the Regional Medical Examiner’s Office in Newark. “There’s a huge number of people who remain unidentified, usually because no one’s looking for them.”

THE STARTLING FIND

The story of Case No. 0708-0151 begins with a chance discovery on a frigid January afternoon.

Delores Walker was sitting at home on Hunterdon Street in Newark on Jan. 26 when detectives rang her door.

“They asked me if I’d smelled anything unusual lately, because a dead body was found across the street,” Walker, 69, recalled. “I said, `What?’”

This is what they told her: That afternoon, two women had stumbled from a local bar and were looking for a place to urinate. They ended up across the street from Walker’s home, in the back of an empty lot at the intersection of Hunterdon Street and Clinton Avenue. The lot was known as a hangout for drunks, and was a popular shortcut to an NJ Transit bus stop.

While ducking behind a mound of construction debris, the women saw a skull. A couple feet away were the remains of a human torso under several layers of clothes: T-shirts, thermal underwear, boxer shorts, velour Gucci pants, and Nike high-top sneakers.

Soon the scene was crawling with homicide detectives, crime scene technicians and an investigator from the Regional Medical Examiner’s Office.

They found no identification on the body. They wrapped it in a sheet, put it in a body bag and took it to the medical examiner’s headquarters on Norfolk Street.

Detectives canvassed the neighborhood for clues. But no one, including Walker, had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“How does that body lie there that long and no one sees or smells anything?” she said. “It’s puzzling.”

In the Norfolk Street autopsy room, Hart and Edward Chmara, an assistant medical examiner, inspected the remains.

Underneath the clothes, all that remained were small amounts of skin and tissue on a full human skeleton. They developed a profile of the dead person: a black male, 55 to 75 years old, about 5 feet 6 inches tall, arthritic, anemic, with a broken nose and poor teeth, likely homeless. He’d probably been dead for several months. It was impossible to tell how he had died, but there was no sign that he had been killed.

Then the search began for someone who knew him.

NO LEADS, FEW CLUES

When the medical examiner’s office released its findings, Newark Detective Kevin Lassiter took them to the police department’s missing person’s unit.

Lassiter, the lead investigator on the case, searched reports for descriptions of people that matched the dead man’s. When he found none, he went back to the neighborhood.

“It’s surprising that someone can be dead back there for so long and go unnoticed,” Lassiter said. “We may have people who, when you go back to the scene, say, `Yeah, there’s a guy who used to hang around here and we haven’t seen him in a while.’”

But he heard nothing.

Neighbors speculated that the body had been dumped. But Lassiter, a homicide detective, didn’t see any evidence of that.

Lassiter investigates all kinds of unusual deaths, but his primary focus is murders. When the bones turned up, he’d already been working on three unsolved killings. So the unidentified man had to compete for Lassiter’s attention with the victims of gunmen who remained on the streets.

Whenever he could, Lassiter returned to the missing person’s unit, and to the corner of Hunterdon and Clinton, looking for a break.

Meantime, the medical examiner’s office was compiling a broader profile of the dead man so he could be entered into a national computerized criminal justice database, called NCIC, which includes descriptions of missing persons. If the profile matched anything in the database, an alert would be sent to Newark police.

In March, with the investigation stalled, the cleaned bones sat in a cardboard box in the refrigerated section of a “decomp room” outfitted with stainless steel sinks, cases of bleach and a bug zapper. The medical examiner’s office brought in dentist Lawrence Dobrin, who took pictures and X-rays of the jaws, now yellowish white and mottled brown. Dobrin noted some missing teeth and concluded that the dead man had not had any dental work.

Chmara submitted tiny amounts of the man’s brain matter and foot muscle for evidence of drugs, but they came back negative.

Two months later, they still had no leads. In May, the medical examiner’s office put an ad in the local newspaper that gave a brief description of the man’s profile and asked anyone with information about him to call.

No one responded.

Then investigators turned to their last hope: DNA.

DOWN TO THE BONE

The timing was good.

State authorities were launching a project to collect DNA to find leads on more than 1,500 missing persons and more than 270 unidentified bodies. That project would become part of a national initiative to put the DNA into a database known as CODIS, which traditionally has been used to keep track of convicted criminals.

On May 15, Lassiter and another detective took a thigh bone from the dead man and drove it to the New Jersey State Police’s DNA laboratory in Hamilton, where DNA would be extracted from the bone and put into CODIS.

There was no match. The difficult truth was that, unless someone reported him missing, there never would be a match.

Chmara, the case’s lead doctor, now had to contemplate doing something he loathed: officially listing the man as unidentified, and the cause of death as undetermined.

“Without anyone interested in who this person is, we’re at a standstill,” Chmara said.

He waited a few months, hoping someone would come forward. Finally, on Aug. 19, the medical examiner’s office sent a notification to the Essex County Division of Welfare, which arranges burials of poor and unidentified people. The division then contacted Eternity Funeral Services in Englewood, which has a county contract to perform the burials. Later that day, funeral director Aree Booker drove his white Cadillac hearse to Norfolk Street to pick up the box of remains, and bring it back to his funeral parlor.

The next morning, Booker and an assistant, Charles Wynn, both wearing black suits, loaded the box into the hearse, stuck a purple “funeral” flag on the car’s window and drove to Maple Grove Park Cemetery in Hacksensack. They were led to a corner of the 150-year-old graveyard near East Moonachie Street. A freshly dug hole was waiting for them at Section A, Lot 529, Grave No. 6.

Booker and Wynn stood for a moment over the box. Booker said a prayer he’d fashioned himself for such occasions.

“Father God,” he said gently, “we trust you in life and trust you in death. As we gather here with no family or friends, we know that even when the earth claims our body, our souls must go back to you.”

There would be no headstone to mark the grave — just a metal stake inscribed with the number 0708-0151. The burial papers would read: “Deceased: Unidentified black male. Age: Unknown.”