BEARING BAD NEWS; CORONER'S INVESTIGATORS TRACK FAMILIES.

Byline: Jason Kandel Staff Writer

It seemed like a routine case, a suicide in a seedy motel in El Monte.

For Los Angeles County coroner's investigator Robert Fierro, however, no case is routine and the hardest part of his job had just begun: Finding the man's next of kin and notifying them of his death.

"Sometimes it's difficult to find the family," Fierro said. "And when you do find them, if you do, you're not there to tell them good news."

In addition to 30 coroner's investigators in the department, two investigators are specifically assigned to track down next of kin. Their dogged work has reunited families with the dead after 30 to 40 years of separation.

It is a daunting task, with about 9,000 deaths a year, most of which require investigators to find and notify next of kin.

"I think one of the passions we have is closure for people by letting them know what happened to family members who died," said Craig Harvey, the chief of operations at the coroner's department. "We don't like it when we have to send people to the crematory with part of the puzzle undone.

"It takes somebody who's interested in a mystery, someone who likes the thrill of the chase."

Of the 819 cases referred to the notification section in 1998, 561 were closed when a family member came forward or investigators determined there is no next of kin.

Investigators Doyle Tolbert and Joyce Kato are still searching for family of the remaining 258 people, even as a steady flow of 15 new cases cross their desks each day.

A case is not officially closed until the family is found or it is determined that there are no surviving family members.

But a body can be cremated immediately after an autopsy, and then its remains are stored for 30 days. If a relative does not come forward within three years, the ashes are poured into a common grave at the Los Angeles County Crematory in East Los Angeles.

THE CLUES OF DEATH

At the El Monte motel, investigator Fierro scanned the room for clues as to who had killed himself. He found a pager on a night stand with the phone number - a good place to start, he thought.

It turned out to be the man's social worker, who told Fierro he didn't know where the man had lived or where to reach his family. But she directed Fierro to a nearby 7-Eleven store, where the man had applied for a job but was turned down because he had tuberculosis.

Fierro went to the 7-Eleven and found someone who knew the man and recalled him saying several days before his death, "If anything happens to me, contact my brother in the Philippines."

The man also left a number with his friend, and Fierro contacted the relatives that day.

"It was a pretty sad case," Fierro said. "This guy was sick. He was alone. And he probably got tired of taking his medication. He just wanted it to end."

ALWAYS SAD

Most of the people whose deaths end up in a case file on Tolbert's desk had lived on the fringe of society. They were homeless. They were addicts. They die alone and, by and large, leave few clues as to who they were and where they had been.

It often takes several months or years of searching through myriad local and national missing persons reports, court records and the Internet.

It is an emotionally difficult job, as investigator Tolbert knows well after eight years in the notification section.

"Probably the most difficult thing is when we do contact the family, they are extremely upset," he said. "It's a roller coaster of mixed emotions. One minute you're way up when you find the family, then you drop right down in the next couple of seconds."

Always, it is sad.

Perhaps Tolbert's saddest case yet involved a man who had survived the Holocaust only to die of old age in an apartment near downtown Los Angeles.

Tolbert learned the man had a sister from whom he was separated during the Holocaust. They lived their lives thinking the other had perished during the massacre.

It turns out that when Tolbert called an old family friend overseas, he learned the man's sister had also died of old age just two weeks prior to his death.

"I was kind of empty. All these years they could have had each other."

A LIFE OF HIDING

Oftentimes people are afraid to file a missing person report for fear of being arrested. And sometimes, news of someone's death brings no surprise to surviving family members.

It took nearly a month and a half before Tolbert found the brother of a 41-year-old man who had died of a drug overdose Oct. 18.

After investigators identified the body, Tolbert asked for the man's arrest records, which would take more than a month to receive. Meanwhile, he searched home address databases, social security records, workplace and credit ratings, vehicle registration, and national and local police agency missing persons reports. He found nothing.

Then, on Dec. 1, the arrest records came through. The brother's name was on a 1989 arrest report, and Tolbert located the man in East Los Angeles.

The brother was not surprised to hear the news.

"I talk to hundreds of families a year," Tolbert said. "The ones who are doing the drugs, they're waiting for me to call. It's like they know one of those phone calls is going to be from somebody like me."

Other people don't want to be found.

Tolbert remembers a call he got last year from a mother who had been looking for her son. She told Tolbert her son had usually spent five- to six-year stints in prison, but he always called when he got out.

It had been more than five years so she figured something was wrong. Apparently so, the coroner found the man had died two days after being released from prison, from a heroin overdose in a abandoned drug house in South Central. Even the man's prison records said he had no family.

"When she called, we put them together," Tolbert said. "She wasn't upset. She just figured something was wrong. Now she knows."

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo: (1 -- 2) County coroner's investigator Robert Fiero talks with El Monte police Officer Gary Antonitis at a suicide scene in an El Monte motel. Below, coroner's technician Anthony Sanchez and Fiero carry the victim's body from the room.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer