A City of Forgotten Angels

Officer Deon Joseph first met Mimi when she jumped in front of his car while he was on patrol. She was a homeless heroin addict trying to orchestrate an injury lawsuit. He was a senior lead officer with the Los Angeles Police Department patrolling his skid row beat.

"I hit the brakes just in time, and she cursed me out, and then I told her some jokes and we became friends," said Joseph, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. "Even though she suffered from drug addiction, it didn't mean she wasn't a good person. I loved her to death."

Six months later, Mimi was dead. She was murdered - strangled to death while she slept on the sidewalk. Joseph found out about his friend after he came back from vacation.

"That was completely heartbreaking for me," he said. Her murder was nearly 20 years ago, but Joseph still remembers her clearly: a tall and slender, Puerto Rican woman in her late 30s .

Joseph doesn't know what happened to Mimi after she died. After patrolling skid row for more than two decades, he said it's not uncommon for the deaths of the homeless to go noticed and their remains to go unclaimed.

More than 800 homeless persons died in 2017 - an increase of over 100 individuals from the year before, according to data from the Los Angeles County Coroner's office. In fact, since 2013, the coroner has seen a steady increase in homeless deaths as the city's homeless population has increased. Hundreds of these dead go unclaimed.

When a person dies on the streets, police first check to see if there was any foul play, Joseph said. From there, police close off the street and calls the coroner's office.

The office attempts to identify the person's remains and notify next of kin. If neither is successful, the body is cremated and kept for up to three years before being buried at a ceremony at potter's field at the Los Angeles County Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

But this process doesn't always go smoothly. Joseph said it is difficult to identify many of the homeless who die on the streets because they do not carry identification.

"Unless we have a family member that decides, 'Let me go find my cousin today,' and has a picture of them, it's really difficult to have somebody claim them," he said, adding that drug use or decomposition can change a person beyond recognition.

"Sometimes we'll find an old picture of them and it's like wow. It's night and day," he said.

With a budget of nearly $40 million, Ed Winter, the assistant chief of investigations operations for the county coroner's office, estimates that the number of cases his office oversees makes it the largest in the country, if not the world. But he also said there are limitations in achieving an accurate count. The act of calculating homeless deaths can be an imprecise science.

"It's kind of a play on words to try to figure out if they are actually homeless," he said. "Are they just on a walking vacation? Or maybe they're dealing with mental issues. Or family issues and they want to separate themselves."

But it's not just skid row where the homeless die. In fact, about one-third of homeless people die at hospitals.

Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center is one of the largest and busiest public hospitals in the United States. Over 100 homeless have died there in the past two-and-a-half years.

Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder is a Presbyterian minister and one of the chaplains at the medical center. She leads the palliative care unit and ministers to patients, family members and even staff.

Gibbs Zehnder estimates that roughly 30 percent of the patients she meets are homeless. Of those homeless patients, she believes three-quarters are without family.

"They've been alienated from their family and friends," Gibbs Zehnder says. "They're in a hospital and there's no one coming to see them, and many times, no one even knows they're there."

As her patients grapple with their own mortality, they often share their personal stories with her so that they do not die a faceless, nameless person.

"Some people are at peace with that," she says. "Other people really struggle with that. They grieve that in their moment of need, they're mostly alone."

Ultimately, however, when a homeless person dies at the county hospital and no family members can be notified, he or she is cremated and the remains are held by the county, just like those who die on the streets.

Other times, Winter said, family members exist. They just don't care.

"Believe it or not you have family that'll say ... 'Oh yeah, Uncle Bob, he was a jerk.' You'll say 'well, he's passed away, you want to make funeral arrangements?' [People say things like] 'I couldn't stand him when he was alive, I could [not] care less that he's dead.' And it's like, how cold hearted," said Winter.

Officer Joseph is fighting that narrative. In addition to patrolling skid row for 20 years, he is also the coordinator for an ecumenical clergy council that holds vigils every time a homeless person dies on skid row.

"The goal ... is to really make it known that they mattered, too," Joseph said. "They weren't just some chump that died on the sidewalk. I think that's huge for the community, and it's just a good thing to do. The right thing to do."

The ceremony is informal, according to clergy council Vice President Dan Anderson. It's held on the street, and those who knew the deceased share stories.

"Most people who live on the street have lost all of their connections, so they're very disconnected from family," Anderson said. "This is an opportunity to have people remember them, and I think that's a good thing to do ... everybody deserves that."

In addition to vigils on skid row or ministry at the public hospital, the County Board of Supervisors organize a yearly ceremony at potter's field in Boyle Heights to inter the ashes of the unclaimed. Typically held in December, the interfaith ceremony honors the lives of people who would otherwise be forgotten.

Chaplain Gibbs Zehnder also takes part in the ceremony each year. She said although it saddens her that so many people go unclaimed, at least the county acts as their family.

"Maybe their loved ones will come in 10 years or 20 years, maybe they'll never come, but we've held a space for them," she said.

The potter's field itself occupies a small, 3 1/2-acre corner of a larger 65-acre private cemetery. A lonely attendant monitors the field during the day in a stuffy office with an air conditioning unit in the window. The only items on his desk are a bible and a corded touch tone phone.

Outside, the grounds of potter's field are well kept. A coaster-sized plaque marks each mass grave, and there are mass graves dating back to the early 1900s. Some of the plots are clearly marked with dozens of flowers, pinwheels and nameplates for those who were claimed or found after burial. Others are just marked by a small slab that displays the year and are tucked away into the corners of the field. Still, people can come to the potter's field and try to find loved ones whose remains are buried here.

Assistant chief coroner Winter cited an example of a rare case in which a woman actually found the remains of her sister who had gone missing in the 1970s. The girl was a runaway from Iowa who had died in Los Angeles before DNA recognition existed. Nonetheless, the girl's sister submitted her DNA to a database a few years ago. Miraculously, she got a hit.

"We were able to say 'your sister is lying in the county cemetery,'" Winter said. "She was thrilled."

Mimi's ashes may or may not be included in the thousands of cremated remains buried within the boundaries of potter's field. For those who were so on the margins of society at the end of their lives, the ceremony and interment at potter's field gives the unclaimed dead closure.

"[They get] a little bit of dignity [so] that they're not forgotten," Winter said.