In March 1989, the man’s body was discovered off Highway 79, south of Interstate 10, in the Beaumont area. He had a single gunshot wound to his chest and investigators ruled his death a homicide.

It wasn’t until recently, however, that his identity was confirmed. The Riverside County Regional Cold Case Unit worked with the Mexican Consulate, and their efforts uncovered that the man was Jorge Lopez-Serrano.

Even with an ID, little is known about Lopez-Serrano, including his age. When his body was found, he was clad in a Cacharel-brand green and tan short-sleeve shirt and DeeCee-brand white work jeans. A grainy photo shows he had dark hair and eyes.

According to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, Lopez-Serrano was a Mexican National who had been arrested several times in the late 1980s, including once by U.S. Border Patrol agents in San Diego on suspicion of smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States. Los Angeles police officers also arrested him on suspicion of vehicle theft.

Lopez-Serrano used different names and birth dates, but key information came from Mexican officials who confirmed he had a wife and children in La Paz. The family’s whereabouts, however, are unknown today.

To bring closure to the case, Cold Case Unit investigators are appealing to the public for any information that leads to the identity of Lopez-Serrano’s family members.

“This includes details about missing persons or any other relevant information that could assist in the investigation,” including tips about the slaying, according to the DA’s office.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Investigator Jason Corey of the Regional Cold Case Unit: coldcaseunit@rivcoda.org

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CALEXICO, Calif. (AP) — The chief of the Border Patrol said Wednesday he was leaving his job after less than two years in a position that lies in the crosshairs of polarizing political debate.

Rodney Scott wrote to agents that he will be reassigned.

“I will continue working hard to support you over the next several weeks to ensure a smooth transition,” he wrote.

Scott, a career agent, was appointed chief in January 2020 and enthusiastically embraced then-President Donald Trump’s policies, particularly on building a border wall. President Joe Biden has canceled wall construction, one of his predecessor’s top priorities.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Scott didn’t immediately respond to a text message.

It isn’t the first time a chief has left with a change in presidential administration. Trump ousted Mark Morgan, a former FBI agent and the first outsider to lead the agency in its 97-year history, during his first week in office and less than a year after he took the job during the Obama administration.

Morgan became a familiar face on cable television fiercely defending Trump’s border policies, getting in the president’s good graces and serving as acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Morgan appointed Scott to lead the Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol chief, who heads an agency of nearly 20,000 agents, is appointed by the CBP commissioner and not subject to Senate confirmation. In April, Biden nominated Chris Magnus, the police chief of Tucson, Arizona, to lead the Border Patrol’s parent agency.

Scott, who spent much of career in San Diego, became an agent in 1992 when San Diego was by far the busiest corridor for illegal crossings. Traffic plummeted after the government dramatically increased enforcement in San Diego, but critics note the effort pushed people to remote parts of California and Arizona, where thousands have died in heat.

San Diego was also where wall construction began in the 1990s, which shaped Scott’s belief that barriers work.

“It wasn’t, ‘Do it in San Diego and stop,’” he told The Associated Press in a 2019 interview. “It was, ‘Let’s prove what works, and then let’s copy it on the southwest border so we can improve security for the whole United States.”

When Scott was named San Diego sector chief in 2017, he devoted much of his remarks at a change-of-command ceremony to how San Diego evolved from the early 1990s. He shared the same story, in abbreviated form, with Trump on live television when the president toured border wall prototypes four months later. Trump often cited San Diego as a model of what he hoped to achieve along the border.

Scott refused to fall in line with a Biden administration directive to stop using terms like “illegal alien” in favor of descriptions like “migrant.”

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PHOENIX (AP) — A project that maps the bodies of border-crossers recovered from Arizona’s inhospitable deserts, valleys and mountains said it documented 227 deaths in 2020, the highest in a decade after the hottest, driest summer in state history.

The previous annual high mapped by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson and the nonprofit Humane Borders was 224 migrant deaths in 2010.

Enforcement efforts in California and Texas over the years have pushed migrants into dangerous terrain in Arizona without easy access to food and water. Humanitarian groups like No More Deaths leave water jugs and other provisions in remote parts of southern Arizona in hopes of saving lives in a region where nearly 3,400 migrant deaths have been documented since 2004.

Despite the increase in deaths, U.S. Border Patrol apprehension figures suggest that the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in Arizona has actually fallen by almost 50% over 10 years.

There were 131,759 migrants apprehended between Oct. 1, 2018, and Sept. 30, 2019, in the Border Patrol’s Yuma and Tucson sectors, which cover the entire Arizona border, compared with more than 248,624 in the same 12 months from 2008 to 2009.

Immigration scholars say they expect a wave of people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to try to cross the U.S.-Mexico border this year following a pair of disastrous hurricanes in Central America and with a Joe Biden administration after four years of hardline policies under President Donald Trump.

“Heading north will continue to be seen as an option,” Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, wrote in November in Americas Quarterly magazine. “President-elect Joe Biden has promised to do things differently, treating migrants and asylum-seekers with dignity.”

Selee warned that sudden policy changes could encourage would-be border-crossers to flood north.

Dr. Greg Hess, Pima County’s medical examiner, and Michael Kreyche, mapping project coordinator with Humane Borders, have said they believe the summer’s record heat and dry weather were the main causes of the unprecedented number of deaths in 2020.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix says the average high temperature was nearly 110 degrees (43 degrees Celsius) in July and nearly 111 in August, helping make it the hottest summer in history. Phoenix’s highs tend to be similar to those in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert north of Mexico, forecasters say.

The weather service said July and August also were the state’s driest summer months on record.

While many remains recovered last year were weathered, partial skeletons that indicated older deaths, there were considerably more recent deaths in 2020 than in previous years, said Dr. Bruce Anderson, forensic anthropologist with the Pima County medical examiner’s office.

Some officials and activists working near the Arizona border, including recently retired Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada, have said they believe border wall construction also pushed migrants into riskier places to avoid workers.

The Border Patrol keeps its own border death statistics, counting the remains of suspected migrants it learns about in the course of its duties, according to its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection.

From January to September 2020, the Border Patrol listed 43 deaths in the Arizona border area. The mapping project tracked 181 deaths over the same nine-month period.

The Border Patrol, which operates on a federal fiscal calendar that ends Sept. 30, has not yet released figures for the last quarter of the 2020 calendar year.

Arizona is not the only place with fluctuations in border deaths over the years.

While migrant deaths are now down in South Texas, eight years ago, the mass graves of border-crossers were being discovered after people began trekking through isolated ranches to avoid the official checkpoint by the small town of Falfurrias.

The Brooks County sheriff’s office said this week that migrant deaths in its jurisdiction fell to 34 last year from 45 in 2019.

In Arizona, a passer-by discovered the last migrant remains of 2020 in the remote southeast corner of the state near New Mexico.

Hess, the medical examiner, said nothing is known so far about the person, whose skeleton was discovered in the uninhabited area east of Douglas, a few miles from Guadalupe Canyon. Work crews there are rushing to complete as much of Trump’s signature border wall as possible before he leaves office.

Hess said autopsy results aren’t expected for several weeks but that the person probably won’t be identified — just like a third of the human remains that turn up in Arizona’s borderlands.

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