Open Notebook: Justice for the Dead 

Last summer, about a year into my reporting fellowship with Shasta Scout, reporter Madison Holcomb and I visited Burney, California, for the first time. It was there that I met Lynette Craig at the Pit River Tribal office, where we sat for hours as she told us the story of her son Nick who went missing in 2020 and whose partial remains weren’t discovered until four years after he was last seen alive. 

Madison and I patiently followed Lynette as her storytelling meandered through the fog of grief; the timeline of her narrative collapsed in on itself, her words fractal and circular at the same time. Particularly distressing to Lynette was how Nick’s skeletal remains had been handled by law enforcement after being found. When she recalled how long her son’s unidentified bones had been left sitting “alone” in a box in a cold evidence room, she said she had this feeling that Nick had been left “stuck” between realms. From her standpoint, part of Nick will always remain stuck: a portion of his spine was lost forever while he was being transported by mail from a DNA lab in Chico to the Modoc County Sheriff’s Office. 

What resonated with me during this interview was Lynette’s focus on the trauma of having lost parts of Nick’s body — a literal second disappearance of her son — which she described as a comparable kind of pain to the first time he went missing. While clearly unintentional, the mishandling of Nick’s remains was an injustice and, for his bereaved community, should be understood as a violation of their right to mourn. It occurred to me that part of the Pit River Tribe’s mission of seeking justice for Nick was not just about revealing the exact circumstances of his death, but demanding accountability for the fact he was deprived of the opportunity to be laid to rest properly. To me this right is sacred. 

I’ve come to learn intimately over my nascent career as a reporter that while the dead are the most defenseless, they are no less worthy than the living. Parts of Lynette’s story echoed international reporting on mothers that I have done in the West Bank and Kashmir. Sadly, her recounting also foreshadowed future stories of tragedy from mothers that would emerge over the second year of my fellowship in Shasta County. These testimonies were not just about a catastrophe as it happens in the immediate, they were also about the harmful reverberations that come after such tragedy and the state’s complicity at times in prolonging that harm rather than assuming its responsibility to mitigate it. At best, the state’s failures in cases like Nicks are negligent, and at worst, they are cruel. 

From this reporting experience, I’ve learned that stories that outline the rights of someone after they die are often overshadowed by the stories of what killed them to begin with. Both matter. Lynette’s story and the others I’ve covered since reminded me of what I’ve previously observed with other bereaved families — that across the world, mourning an unresolved death can become a powerful political force.

In 2023 I interviewed Palestinian families whose loved ones’ corpses were seized by the Israeli army after being killed. The practice, known as postmortem detention, violates international law — regardless if the decedent was a combatant or civilian. One middle-aged man told me how “his life froze” the day his brother was shot dead by the occupation forces, after which the body was contained in a morgue in Israel across the heavily armed separation wall. It’s a boundary which those living under military rule in the West Bank, like the dead man’s brother, cannot access under any circumstance. 

In covering separate guerilla uprisings in both Indian-administered Kashmir and the state of Punjab, each straddling the border between India and Pakistan, I heard stories about how tens of thousands of youths were forcibly disappeared by state paramilitaries, their mothers subjected to a very particular kind of collective punishment: never truly knowing if their child is dead or alive with no body to confirm. 

We all read stories of war; headlines that amount to this many dead and that many wounded. And for Western audiences who may have never been exposed to armed conflict, the dignity of the dead may come as an afterthought in comparison to the conflict itself. But for affected families, it is at the forefront of their minds, and the state-enforced lack of closure is the catalyst that pushes them forward as they tirelessly demand answers from the government. After all, a family’s right to mourn and, by proxy, ensure dignity for their dead are not abstract concepts; they are codified explicitly by the Geneva Convention. 

I was not expecting to encounter this dynamic again when I took a job with Shasta Scout in rural Northern California. But while stories like Lynette’s occurred in a totally different context, much of her circumstances, and her anguish, felt eerily familiar. 

For example, California has laid out specific procedures for how correctional officers are to notify next of kin after an in-custody death. But even with these laws in place, my reporting has shown how difficult it is for bereaved families to obtain basic answers from the county after someone perishes behind bars. The family of John Adena, who died while incarcerated at the Shasta County Jail in 2019, had to issue a legal demand just to get his autopsy from the county, his sister told me, and she and her relatives were forced to bury him without knowing his cause of death. And the sister of Juan Moreno described how incredulous she was that she never even got to identify her brother’s body after his death in jail. These indignities leave families with no sense of control over how to process what has happened to them while continuing to vest near-total control in law enforcement, the very power which failed to keep their loved ones safe. 

People’s stories do not end when they die, nor do their rights. Violence can be and is inflicted upon the dead when national forces, or correctional bodies at the state and county level, do not take accountability, or even extend basic decency to mourning families. But neither the dead nor their families are to be discarded, and this is why I do the work I do. Today, I’ll leave Shasta Scout as my two-year fellowship ends. But when I’m gone, my former colleagues will continue to exhume these stories, buried in redacted public records like bodies hid in unmarked graves.

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