LOS ANGELES (AP) — Arusyak Martirosyan struggles to open the door of the one-bedroom residence overflowing with the belongings from a life lived however not claimed in dying.
Wedged in opposition to the door is a big field of Acquire laundry detergent and plastic tubs piled excessive. Blouses and T-shirts, suspended by hangers over a front room curtain rod, block out virtually all daylight. Bins and bins, brimming with extra garments, disguise the carpet. Empty takeout containers and Tupperware, with bugs trapped inside, cowl the range.
The 74-year-old lady died in October within the hospital, and weeks later nobody had come ahead for her stays. Carrying a Tyvek protecting swimsuit and trailed by the constructing’s property supervisor, Martirosyan hunts for a greeting card or letter despatched to her that would have a member of the family’s handle on the return label — something that might result in a relative who might give this lady a correct burial.
Martirosyan acts as a residing consultant of these Los Angeles County calls “the unclaimed lifeless.” She is one among greater than a dozen investigators who work for the Public Administrator, an understaffed and little-known department of the county’s Division of the Treasurer and Tax Collector.
Her job is to unearth who the girl was beneath all her belongings and discover out who she beloved, who beloved her and what she wished after her dying.
Martirosyan and her colleagues spend three years investigating a case earlier than relinquishing the deceased to a communal gravesite, a final resort within the county cemetery. Related work is completed in cities throughout the U.S. however in Los Angeles, with one of many nation’s largest homeless populations, the efforts are notably tough.
It’s a painstaking course of to retrace a life. Investigators, who deal with about 200 circumstances yearly, are given a manila file folder containing a reputation, birthdate and little else for every dying.
“I’m going via their lives in so some ways,” Martirosyan mentioned. “They do change into mine.”
At first, it’s a race in opposition to time. The particular person’s physique lays frozen within the county morgue because the investigators scramble to seek out household earlier than being pressured to provide the go-ahead to cremate the stays.
For weeks, they name nursing houses and homes of worship, scour public information and ancestry web sites and comb via houses and flats.
“We’re like getting into the sneakers of the lifeless particular person,” mentioned Dennis Cotek, one among Martirosyan’s supervisors, who acknowledges he usually thinks in regards to the lives he has encountered even after going residence for the day.
“I all the time say a bit of prayer for them,” he mentioned.
The deceased could not have any surviving next-of-kin, or their family members can’t afford to pay for a person burial. Different instances, estranged kinfolk refuse to be concerned or a buddy is unable to petition a court docket to take possession of their stays.
Martirosyan, who has been on the job simply over a yr, mentioned her work has made her keenly conscious of her personal mortality and spurred tearful however necessary conversations together with her teenage son.
“That is going to occur, in a technique or one other, to all of us,” she mentioned.
That’s additionally what largely drives her and the remainder of the military of public servants on their quest to convey dignity to tens of 1000’s of people that die alone in probably the most populous U.S. county. Their efforts culminate with a communal burial and a multilingual, interfaith ceremony, an occasion that has been held yearly since 1896.
The latest ceremony on Dec. 14 recalled the common devastation and loneliness of the pandemic. The burial of 1,937 individuals included for the primary time those that died from the coronavirus. Among the many lifeless had been immigrants, kids and homeless individuals.
“We don’t know sufficient in regards to the individuals we’re burying at the moment to essentially do them justice,” county supervisor Janice Hahn mentioned.
A number of dozen individuals, some wiping away tears, attended the outside ceremony as clergy members prayed over the communal grave within the county cemetery. Every laid a white rose on the gravesite.
“I wanted we might have been there for all of them once they had been nonetheless alive, in a greater approach, in order that they didn’t must die utterly disconnected and alone,” mentioned Susan Rorke, a neighborhood resident who has attended the providers for a decade. “I could find yourself on this graveyard in a ceremony after I die. So I don’t miss this occasion.”
Many individuals on the service had been county workers like Martirosyan and Carlos Herrera, a upkeep employee who has volunteered to assist dig the graves for greater than 30 years.
In early December, Herrera and his group dug a 14-foot-deep (4.27 meters) plot for the 1,937 plastic bins containing the ashes of every particular person and, if recognized, a label with their names. The positioning was marked by a flat headstone. It bears no names; solely the yr of their deaths, which was 2020 for this group.
Cotek and Martirosyan are simply starting to retrace the lifetime of the 74-year-old lady. The investigators searched her residence in November, having only some primary information within the manila folder, together with a neighborhood pastor’s cellphone quantity and the date when she moved into the residence: 1988.
Martirosyan methodically flipped via folders in a submitting cupboard as Cotek pulled worn black-and-white composition notebooks off a bookshelf.
Framed Korean Bible verses held on the partitions. They discovered incapacity profit kinds, a clean U.S. citizenship utility, financial institution statements — all doubtlessly necessary clues that went into an proof bag.
Again at their workplace in downtown Los Angeles, the investigators handed over the proof bag to a colleague with a suggestion to look in Korea for potential kinfolk.
If nobody is discovered after three years, the county will deal with the girl’s interment. If she left behind sufficient cash in her property, her ashes would go into a person area of interest with a nameplate in a columbarium, the place urns are saved.
Whereas her possessions weren’t deemed to be price promoting, the county has a warehouse stuffed with bins of belongings, together with vinyl information, Barbie doll collections, traditional vehicles and framed paintings, that it auctions off to pay for niches for different decedents. If there’s not sufficient to cowl that, the particular person’s ashes can be positioned within the communal grave.
The girl could possibly be buried there in 2026.
The day after looking out her residence, Martirosyan nets a breakthrough on one other case. A girl cries upon studying by cellphone that her mom, from whom she had been estranged, has died. It’s devastating information for the daughter, but it surely means her mom gained’t find yourself within the county’s unclaimed grave.
“This can be a good day for us,” Martirosyan mentioned. “At the least for this portion of their lives, they’re linked.”
However in a county of almost 10 million, there’s all the time one other life but to be claimed.
Martirosyan turns to her backlog of circumstances and begins once more.
