It should have been a fairly routine exhumation of a man's body from a local cemetery in Brooks County in southern Texas: ask the funeral home to point out the right plot on a map, and then dig up the remains with shovels and trowels.For new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines, follow NPR’s Short Wave podcast.But Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, had run into a problem."We don't know where he's buried," the staff there told her.Nor did they know where more than a hundred other Central American migrants who had died were interred.Spradley says the practice is illegal — and a human rights violation."Everyone should have dignity in death," she says."And there is no dignity in taking someone, burying them and just forgetting about it — and never returning to try to further investigate who this person was or how to get them back to their family.
The torture that the families were going through, not knowing where their loved ones were."That is when Spradley says she and her team realized: "We are going to have to exhume this entire cemetery."This effort, which began in 2013, caught the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, which just named Spradley one of this year's MacArthur Fellows.This cohort of 20 academics and artists each receive $800,000 over five years, no strings attached.Other winners include a bioengineer who's creating nanotechnologies to improve vaccines and drug delivery, a climate researcher examining the interaction between polar sea ice and global change, and an organic chemist using electricity to help build complex molecules more efficiently and sustainably.Spradley is one of the recipients being recognized for their work at the intersection of science and justice.The body in that cemetery in Brooks County belonged to a young man from El Salvador named Elmer Esau Barahona.In 2012, he fled his country because a gang was pressuring him to join its ranks.
"He did not want to join...