When There’s No One to Attend to the Dead

On a Tuesday afternoon in December 2021, a police officer in Hidalgo County, Tex., found the body of 47-year-old Yvonne Salas on the kitchen floor of a mobile home. She had bloodshot eyes, blood leaking from her nose and mouth, and bruises on her face with dark marks that authorities suspected had been made by the ring worn by her boyfriend, Adan Roberto Ruiz, who had called 911 while drunk. Salas’s body was transported to the Nueces County Medical Examiner—the nearest available, at 140 miles away in Corpus Christi—and by...