 FALFURRIAS - Unidentified migrants who died entering the United States were buried in mass graves in a South Texas cemetery, with remains found in trash bags, shopping bags, body bags, or no containers at all, researchers discovered. University of Indianapolis/Guy Housewright 
 
 Some bones and decomposed bodies were simply dumped straight into the dirt, while multiple skulls were found inside biohazard bags that had been placed between the scant few coffins. In another instance, at least five people in body bags and smaller plastic bags were piled on top of each other, Baylor University anthropologist Lori Baker said. “To me it’s just as shocking as the mass grave that you would picture in your head, and it’s just as disrespectful,” Krista Latham, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Indianapolis, told the newspaper. Exhuming 52 plots in the Sacred Heart Burial Park in Falfurrias, anthropologists found the remains of multiple individuals who had been stuffed into garbage, shopping and body bags and dumped into crowded graves. The discovery came in the last two weeks as the pair of anthropologists and their students continued an all-volunteer, multiyear effort to identify migrants who have died of exposure while evading Border Patrol checkpoints in remote South Texas, where temperatures reach more than 100 degrees in the summer and there is little water and shade. County officials have been paying Howard-Williams $450 for each migrant body it buries—most of them were recovered from the surrounding desert—for 16 years. The remains were buried in the Brooks County-owned section of the cemetery by funeral home Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams, which was bought in 1999 by Service Corporation International. A kitchen garbage bag containing bones was tucked inside a gift bag emblazoned with a logo featuring the word “Dignity,” Baker said, indicating one of the funeral service brands owned by Howard-Williams’ parent company, Houston-based Service Corporation International. “No matter if this is one of our client families we serve on a traditional basis or a migrant family’s loved one we’re serving and we don’t have any identification of the loved one, I do want to let you know it is our policy to treat the decedent with care, to treat them just like we would treat anyone else,” McDunn said. However, Jennifer McDunn, a spokesperson for Service Corporation International, told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times that it does have some records, “but this does not amount to confirmation that Howard-Williams was involved in depositing the remains in the manner the researchers described.” The company is refusing to release the documents. “Because of the sensitive nature of our business, it is not our general practice to share our records publicly, no matter the decedent or the family we serve,” McDunn said.
– The task was hard enough, even without complications: Forensic anthropologists were trying to identify the remains of migrants who perished in remote South Texas while trying to cross from Mexico into the US. Many of those remains ended up in a cemetery in Falfurrias, and when the volunteers made 52 exhumations, they expected to find 52 corpses. Instead, as the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reports, they found many more—but they can't say for sure given the state of burial. They discovered remains jammed into trash bags, shopping bags, and body bags; bones from multiple bodies inside the same bags; and some remains without any containers whatsoever. In short, it looked more like a dump than a cemetery, they say. “To me it’s just as shocking as the mass grave that you would picture in your head, and it’s just as disrespectful,” says one of the anthropologists, from the University of Indianapolis. The remains are in a Brooks County cemetery, and the county pays the Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams funeral home $450 per body to handle burials. The funeral home has “certain records related to these burials, but this does not amount to confirmation that Howard-Williams was involved in depositing the remains in the manner the researchers described," says a spokesperson. Vocativ picks up on this aspect of the story: Complaints about improper burials often originate from the families of the deceased, "an issue when it comes to unidentified migrants, whose families have no way of knowing where they ended up." (Brooks County has seen a big increase in illegal immigrants trying to cross the border in recent years.)