FRESNO, Calif. — On a recent morning, Fresno County Deputy Coroner Bianca Torres was kneeling at the base of a burned up car. Nearby was a grisly sight: a skeleton found in the driver's seat – but not the whole skeleton.
“Because that person was seated there in the driver's seat, we know that we're missing pieces,” she said – specifically, missing bones.
She was looking for bone fragments with a team of professionals including a firefighter, an arson investigator, a forensic anthropologist and a homicide detective.
Normally, not all of them would have been doing this work, but they were enrolled in a training – and this scene was staged as part of the inaugural Central California Forensic Fire Death Investigation Academy. The intensive, weeklong course took place mid-April at Fresno City College.
As wildfires become more destructive in California, the need for forensic investigations afterward is increasing — specifically, the need for identifying bodies. The academy teaches first responders how to assist and recover human remains after fatal wildfire mass disasters.
So as Torres swept and sifted through debris, others were pulling out pieces of the car’s carpet. It was a team effort, because they learned every piece found during an investigation is crucial.
“Body preservation, bone preservation, that's very important to us, the medical examiner and the anthropologists,” Torres said.
Training offers affordable, specialized skills
The five-day academy consisted of three days of lectures that taught attendees how a body burns and how to recover remains without accidentally damaging critical evidence. The last two days, students were set into groups to study a fire scenario and recover the remains within it. Some scenarios simulated houses, while others revolved around cars.
Chelsey Juarez, a forensic anthropologist and a professor at Fresno State, led the academy. She said wildfires are becoming increasingly fatal.
“As someone who responds to fire, the best time to prepare is right now,” she said.
Juarez is one of about seven forensic anthropologists in California with expertise in fire crime scene investigations, according to Fresno State.
In the last ten years, at least 180 people have died from fires in California, including the fires Camp and Palisades fires that wiped out parts of Butte and Los Angeles counties. So, she said, if fires at that scale continue, more people might be pulled into investigating wildfire deaths – and she wants them to have a chance to learn before the next big wildfire occurs.
Many of the attendees came from the Valley, but some traveled from as far as the Bay Area, the East Coast and even Scotland. Juarez said she wanted to plant the training in the Central Valley because professionals in the area should have better access to it.
“We've been lucky so far,” Juarez said, referring to Fresno County. “We've had fires, no doubt, but we haven't had a [Camp Fire], and we haven't had a Palisades [Fire]. But that doesn't mean it's not in our future.”
Deadly wildfires may be a new norm
According to Juarez, human remains ravaged by fire need to be handled with care.
“When we see bodies in fatal fire scenes, they're super fragile,” she said. “Their soft tissue features have changed, making visual identification really, really difficult.”
Bone fragments and other factors can help in identifying a victim’s age and sex, she said, as well as how they died and any harm they incurred beforehand.
Juarez said when a body burns, many traits like tattoos or birth marks fall away, leaving professionals to lean on other things in a fire scene. So every piece of that body is important, but so is where and how it was found.
“If this is a real fatal fire, we don't know how many people are in that structure,” Juarez said. “We might know the addresses and who those houses belong to, but we don't know how many people are in there. And if we are going to try to determine from the remains that we get back how many people are in that structure, we need a full recovery. We need all the parts of our victims back.”
Juarez said that, to make sure no human remains are compromised, first responders need to work together like a “well-oiled machine” instead of being siloed in different specializations.
“We really need them to understand how their job affects the jobs of others,” she said.
For Dara Herrick, collecting evidence of the scene and body revealed details she never thought of before. Herrick is a longtime firefighter from Santa Cruz who recently became a fire investigator.
“Am I used to fire and fighting fires and running emergency scenes? Yes,” Herrick said. “But the slow, detailed work of cleaning out the scene and trying to figure out what's going on from a fire fatality and from an investigator's perspective is new for me.”
Teaching the next generation of forensic anthropologists
All of this work is rewarding to attendees like Mackenzie Aponte-Guante, a graduate student studying forensic anthropology at New York University. Giving families answers is why she’s pursuing the career.
“‘We found your loved one, and here they are,’” she said, referencing what she would say to a family. “Not only ‘we found them,’ but ‘we get to give them back,’ and that provides a lot of closure for the families too.”
Aponte-Guante grew up in the Southern California community of Hacienda Heights. She remembers being fascinated by the animal carcasses left in her family’s backyard that were dragged in by coyotes.
“I wanted to go poke it,” she said. “I want to know what's in there. Luckily, my parents were not like, ‘She's crazy.’ So they supported it.”
The unincorporated community is also mere miles from where the Los Angeles fires started last year. Over 30 people died in those fires, and the training made her think of what it took to identify them.
While Aponte-Guante was affected by the L.A. fires, Juarez was working on them by recovering the remains of those who were killed.
Juarez knows the damage wildfires cause, and yet she still calls California home. This work is helping keep everyone more prepared, she said.
“I love California,” Juarez said. “It's part of me. It's part of my soul and my existence and my being. But fire is also part of us.”
