Lori Baker (LB) and Erich Baker (EB)

LB: I went out on a forensic case, and the sheriff had a skull on his office desk. It was the skull of a younger person, and he was using it as a pencil holder. He had pens and pencils in the eye socket of this person. So that’s when I decided something had to be done. Now what we do is we go to cemeteries along the border. Sometimes there are multiple individuals in one grave. We found people in trash bags. And we work to determine who they are. We take DNA samples and go through reports that families have filed to find one little thing that might connect to the case that you’re working on. When we have an identification it’s resolution. But the families are going to know the horrible things that happened to their loved one. They die of heat stroke. It’s exposure. And it’s really overwhelming when you’re holding them in your hands and you see the blisters that are on the feet of these individuals. I remember our very first identification. It was a woman. She had two young daughters, and she lived with her mom. She couldn’t take care of them so she decided to come to the U.S. so that she could work and send money home. So she paid someone to smuggle her across, and she twisted her ankle and the group left her behind because she couldn’t keep up. Her remains came to me, and when it was an identification, I thought I gotta find out from that mom if it would have been better just not to know, thinking that may she lived and would come home someday. And she said, ‘No, the hope eats you alive every day.’ And now they say they are blessed because they’re able to lay flowers on her grave.

EB: Has it gotten any easier?

LB: It hasn’t. I would love not to do this anymore, but I don’t think I have it in me not to. Especially when we have a 11-year-old child and I know we probably won’t figure out who he is and his mom’s probably grieving somewhere. It’s, it’s really something I don’t know that I’ll ever get over if we don’t figure out who he is.