screen the case for suspected human rights violations before agreeing to take it on.

The autopsy room at the Eusebio funeral home is stark, clean and odorless. Kitchen knives and a sharpening stone are stacked in a sink. A wire rack holds glue, metal probes and other tools.

First, the CHR team takes an inventory of Cruz's tattoos - on his right upper pectoral, right arm and back. Then they remove the stitching from the previous autopsy and sponge away the embalming fluid from his torso.

They discover three bullet wounds, in Cruz's abdomen, chest and head. Later, they trace the path that each bullet took. One entered his chest, crossed a lung and ventricle of his heart, then exited through his back. Another bullet entered near his navel and piercedpart of his small intestine.

The path of the third bullet through Cruz's brain is more difficult to trace. The CHR team finds a hole above his right ear and another in his shattered skull.

With a foot-long kitchen knife and a hacksaw, the team opens his skull and finds a bullet fragment. The police coroners missed it because they didn't open his skull.

Only toward the end of the autopsy does the CHR team spot the entry wound beneath Cruz's chin, obscured by embalming putty and make-up applied after the first autopsy. They use a metal probe to trace the bullet's path. It entered from underneath his chin, then the bullet split.

"It happens that you sometimes overlook something," says Joseph Jimenez, a CHR coroner, referring to the difficulty of conducting