The first reference to her comes, of all places, on an airplane. It’s the end of April and sitting next to me is Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Both of us are on our way back to Santa Fe from Washington, D.C., after the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s weeklong annual gathering. Coghlan, galvanized by the last several days of activities, spends most of the flight ticking down his list of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s most recent sins. But suddenly he turns to the past.
“Did you know that the person with the highest levels of plutonium in her body after the atomic detonation at Trinity Site was a woman from Truchas?” he asks me. The remark, more hearsay than fact, piques my interest. As Coghlan knows, that’s my pueblito, the place in northern New Mexico where I grew up on land passed down through many generations of women. Tina Cordova — co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium — would know more, he adds. “Ask her.”
Truchas, short for Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Río de las Truchas, sits on a ridge in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level. With some 370 people in town, most everybody keeps up with the latest mitote, or gossip, at the local post office. A regional variation of Spanish is still spoken by elders. Bloodlines go back centuries. And neighbors might also be relatives. If she is from this tiny, but remarkable, speck on the map, I must at least know of her. My mom, a deft weaver of family trees, definitely would.
Truchas is also 225 miles north of the Trinity Site, the location of the world’s first atomic blast. On July 16, 1945, at the peak of monsoon season, a clandestine group of scientists lit up the skies of the Chihuahuan Desert with the equivalent of 24.8 kilotons of TNT. In the first 10 days, wind would carry the radioactive fallout across 46 states — so far, in fact, that the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, traced spots on film to radioactive material released by the bomb.
It’s plausible, given such an expansive reach, that this Trucheña who Coghlan casually mentions is among a wave of Trinity’s first unknowing victims. Historically, she signals a profound rupture in time — before nuclear weapons and after. But at the moment, his comment seems impossible to grasp. It’s only in hindsight that the single most important question takes form, one that will dog me for more than six months: Who is she?
Incomprehensible autopsies
Just over a month later, I hear about her for the second time, at a journalism conference. I’ve just boarded a black van after standing at the outer boundary of the Trinity Site, southeast of Socorro, under the searing summer sun. Nearby are Cordova, Mary Martinez White and Bernice Gutierrez from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, primed to talk to nuclear journalists from around the world about the harrowing experience of living downwind of Trinity.
I tell Cordova who I am and where I’m from. The words have barely left my lips when she repeats, almost, verbatim, what Coghlan told me earlier, this time adding the original source of the information: the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project, known as the LAHDRA report.
Published in 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and based on millions of classified and unclassified documents from the earliest years of the Manhattan Project to the late 1990s — the report’s stated purpose was to identify “all available information” concerning radioactive materials and chemicals released at Los Alamos National Laboratory (known as the Los Alamos Scientific Library from 1947 to 1981).
Some of the documents are autopsy records, I come to find. The lab routinely released plutonium into the air from several facilities on its campus, but it wasn’t until 1978 that it began to measure those releases consistently. One question that preoccupied researchers was whether data culled from the autopsies would reveal higher rates of plutonium in people who lived near or worked in those nuclear facilities.
There is another cache of autopsies, too, for the scientific equivalent of a control group — randomly selected people who simply lived and died in northern New Mexico. Cases from the control group were also analyzed, the report added, “in an effort to review the possible plutonium exposure from the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.”
I quickly scroll down to see which person in this group had the highest plutonium levels. And there it is: The highest levels do indeed belong to an unnamed woman from Truchas, alive at the time of the Trinity detonation.
But what comes next in the report will preoccupy me for months: “The plutonium concentration in her liver was 60 times higher than that of the average New Mexico resident.”
The number is incomprehensible to me. First, the actual amount is never stated, nor is the amount for the average New Mexican. But there is also a glaring contradiction that I detect only after reading the paragraph’s final cryptic line many times over. Fallout from Trinity, it essentially explains, didn’t cascade over Truchas until 12 hours after the initial blast. At that distance, there was no telling whether fallout could be inhaled or ingested — the most direct and harmful paths of entry.
It’s a paradox. Trinity stood out as the most obvious culprit — she was, after all, alive when it was detonated — but even the researchers weren’t certain. The only fact is the plutonium itself. Somewhere, somehow it entered her body in the form of barely visible specks of alpha radiation. And once there, those particles began a long migration, from her bloodstream to her kidneys and, ultimately, to her liver. The question is how?
The entry is most striking for its brevity, no more than a paragraph amid the report’s 638 pages. Partly, this has to do with the expansive scope of the LAHDRA project, which covers far more than these autopsies, and partly because of the secrecy and laws that protect personal privacy. Through the prism of science, this Trucheña is a single, mysterious data point. From this same prism, the unwritten parts of her life look like negative space. But when I imagine who she is, I also imagine what would fill that space — all the parts of her story that must exist but have been left out.
For now, I don’t even know her name.
Exotic poison
In an interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in 1965, chemist Glenn Seaborg described plutonium as “one of the most exotic metals in the periodic table — maybe the most.” Seaborg had created plutonium out of uranium in 1940 and still, 25 years later, at least some of its properties were anomalous.
How plutonium poisoned the body was also largely unknown. The survivors in Nagasaki, Japan, where U.S. forces dropped a plutonium bomb on August 9, 1945, began to see increased rates of leukemia in the years immediately following the blast, most notably among children. Twelve years later, tumor registries were founded to track the cancer incidences in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States detonated “Little Boy,” a uranium bomb, on Aug. 6, 1945.
But in Los Alamos, there were only three instances of acute radiation poisoning — Harry Daghlian in 1945, Louis Slotin, in 1946, and Cecil Kelley, in 1958. Daghlian and Slotin both received a fatal blast of radiation while handling the same core of plutonium, the “demon core” as it was later dubbed. Daghlian died 25 days after the accident; Slotin survived for only nine. Kelley died within 35 hours of performing an operation to purify and concentrate plutonium in a large mixing tank. As the tank swirled, the plutonium inside it assumed the right shape and size to produce a brief nuclear chain reaction. The injuries the men suffered were ghastly.
Besides those were the less dramatic cases: Nuclear workers who were routinely exposed to much smaller amounts of plutonium on the job, and citizens exposed through atmospheric testing, which began in Nevada in 1951 and didn’t end in America until 1963. By the time of Kelley’s death, data on those other groups had yet to be collected, much less analyzed.
When I email Joseph Shonka, the primary author of the LAHDRA report, I get my first insights about the Human Tissue Analysis Program, a landmark project that gathered data about how plutonium exposure affected people’s health long-term.
“During the concerns about global fallout in the late 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted a research program to measure the levels of plutonium in US residents,” he replied by email in August. The research was based on “plutonium workers who voluntarily agreed to contribute their bodies to research, as well as appropriately obtained tissues from autopsies from nearby residents of AEC facilities and from random individuals across the US, including New Mexico.”
I can’t help but obsess over two words: “appropriately obtained.” History tells of doctors performing grisly acts in the name of science, but that was before the dawn of biomedical ethics. I’d assumed that those ethics had become self-evident in modern-day autopsy practices and that tissues were always “appropriately obtained.” That’s not the case here, I realize after an Internet search. How the tissues for this research program were obtained was, in fact, deeply controversial, if not unlawful.
Autopsy authority from ‘God’
In 1996, Cecil Kelley’s wife and daughter filed a class-action lawsuit against the Regents of the University of California, the school that had managed the lab since 1943, and 10 other defendants, including former lab director Norris E. Bradbury. The autopsies, unlawful and fraudulent, were conducted on both lab employees and the general public “without the knowledge, informed consent, or permission of the families involved,” the complaint asserted. What occurred, it went on, was the “unauthorized and illegal research and experimentation” on the corpses of hundreds of New Mexico residents and others around the country. And plaintiffs only became aware of it, “to their extreme shock and horror,” many decades after the fact. In the press, it was known as the case of the “body snatchers.”
The human tissue program began on Jan. 1, 1959, a day after Cecil Kelley’s horrific death. Clarence Lushbaugh, who worked for the lab and was also the pathologist and chief of staff at Los Alamos Medical Center, had long been waiting for “an employee with known exposure to radioactive substances to die so that the body could be autopsied and the radioactivity of the lungs could be counted,” legal filings said. “Mr. Kelley’s accident and subsequent death provided Defendant Lushbaugh with the opportunity he’d been waiting for.”
By the program’s end in 1985, 271 lab workers and 1,825 members of the general population, from New Mexico and across the country, had been secretly autopsied and their organs sent to the lab to be studied for plutonium content. Besides the obvious transgressions, the project had a number of other yawning flaws, including 489 tissue samples that were lost when a freezer failed.
Participating pathologists, first at Los Alamos Medical Center, the program’s unofficial headquarters in New Mexico, and then in other cities, ostensibly performed the autopsies to determine a person’s cause of death. But that was just a cover for the real motive, which was to entirely remove and analyze lungs, kidneys, spleen, vertebrae, lymph nodes and, in men, gonads, the class action asserted.
The pathologists “exercised a clause in their autopsy permit form that allowed collection of tissues for ‘scientific research,’ a U.S. General Accounting Office report later said. “As a result, Los Alamos officials did not feel it was necessary to obtain their own informed consent documentation.” Families, in other words, were never asked for permission.
Among the records, I read about Kelley’s particularly ghoulish autopsy; Lushbaugh stored his entire nervous system in a mayonnaise jar and sent his brain to Washington, D.C., for study. When asked in his deposition who granted him the authority to do so, Lushbaugh said “God.”
Clues without names
A kind of armor protects the lab’s nuclear secrets. For that reason alone, I have little faith that I will be able to identify her — the anonymous Trucheña with 60 times more plutonium in her body than any other New Mexican autopsied in this hair-raising study. But I keep looking. Maybe it’s that I believe finding her can reaffirm, in some small measure, her humanity. All I know is that I need a tangible public record. And the class-action lawsuit is the best and only place to start.
I arrive at Santa Fe’s District Court on a Friday morning in October to find all 5,077 pages of that lawsuit, a number that surprises even the clerk. The documents are digitized, she tells me, but very likely out of order.
Over the next month, I show up three times, ferried into the same lonely viewing room to the same clunky desktop computer. On the first day, I find Lushbaugh’s deposition among reams of legal back and forth. My second visit unearths an obscure publication that leads me to another obscure publication, volume 37 of “Health Physics,” a medical journal devoted to radiation safety. Published in 1979, it contains the biggest lead yet — a list of the Human Tissue Analysis Program’s decedents in New Mexico and across the country, all unnamed.
Each entry reads like a bullet point: Case number, occupation, residence, state and cause of death. A separate column includes sex, age, years of living in Los Alamos — if they did live there — and year of death. The columns reveal, in clinical and unnerving detail, each organ by weight and radioactivity, if any.
Here, there is no whole greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it’s the parts that so preoccupied researchers — line after line of organs measured down to the gram, and line after line of radioactivity measured down to disintegrations per minute. But the story I glean is more complicated than these facts and figures alone. It’s about the scientific desire to reduce people into mere objects of study and the violence of that reduction.
The Los Alamos Medical Center plays a key role. As one of the few hospitals in the region, LAMC attracted Norteños from at least three counties. The deceased lived in Peñasco, Cordova, Española, Velarde, Los Alamos, Santa Fe, the Santa Clara, San Ildefonso and Picuris Pueblos, the Jicarilla Apache Nation and beyond. Their occupations are just as diverse: housewives, laborers, farmers, truck drivers, realtors, restaurant owners, bakers, insurance salesmen, and even children — if that can be called an occupation.
Approximately 80 percent of these Norteños were alive during the Trinity test, I calculate. They lived in places that were roughly the same distance from the detonation site as Truchas — closer in certain cases — and at least some of their organs contained plutonium, the entries show. But since medical histories were never collected, researchers never had a full picture of how or why a person might have been exposed in the first place.
And then I see her. The woman I’ve been desperately pursuing finally emerges in the seventh row on page 24 — a housewife from Truchas who died at age 91, in 1972. Cause of death: pneumonia.
Sure enough, the plutonium in her liver is orders of magnitude greater than everyone else, including the people who lived through the Trinity detonation. The LAHDRA report’s hypothesis attributing her exposure to Trinity couldn’t be true, I deduce. If it were, then scores of other people would have as much of the substance in their bodies as she did, simply by virtue of being alive in July 1945. But they don’t. I have to wonder: Is it a fluke? Is there something else the data isn’t saying?
It’s already late, but I quickly begin searching for online obituaries. Only one match comes up.
“Epifania S. Trujillo, a lifelong resident of Truchas died at the age of 91, September 26, in the Los Alamos Medical Center following a long illness,” reads the October 1972 obituary in the Rio Grande Sun. “She is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Cosme Romero of Truchas and Mrs. Glenn Manges of Gallup; a sister Veronice Padilla of Truchas, 25 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren.”
The realization instantly washes over me: I’ve known her family all my life.
Quilter, devotee, mother, grandmother
Epifania Sandoval was born in 1881, 31 years before New Mexico became a state. Originally from Cordova, another mountain pueblito, Epifania had moved four miles northeast to Truchas around the time she got married in 1907. In an early undated photo, she poses next to her mustachioed husband, José Gabino Trujillo, striking and stern.
A petite woman, Epifania was known to roll her own cigarettes and smoke them in short, staccato puffs. She was a talented quilter and a pious Catholic who’d suffered the loss of an infant son in a construction accident. Years later, she still carried the grief and would spend much of her life as a devoted lay member of the Society of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. So deep was her devotion that she even named one of her daughters Carmelita.
Around 1955, Epifania moved in with Carmelita, her husband, Cosme Romero, and seven grandchildren. By then, Cosme had landed a well-paying local job as a janitor at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (the former name of Los Alamos National Laboratory), after having worked itinerantly across the West for almost two decades. Every day, he would make the same haul, driving from the Sangre de Cristos, across the Tewa Basin to the Pajarito Plateau, home of the secret lab on “the hill.” Los Alamos is just shy of 40 miles away, but back then — in the transformational years after the Manhattan Project — it might as well have been another world.
I know none of this when I call two of Carmelita and Cosme’s daughters, Nora and Cecilia, now in their seventies and eighties, whom I’ve known since I was four. I likely met them around 1990, when my parents moved back to Truchas to take care of my 99-year-old great-grandmother. Every Sunday, our family dutifully went to Nuestra Señora del Rosario for mass, and every Sunday we’d sit a few pews behind theirs. I still see Nora and Cecilia when I visit and they still call me mi’jita, a cariño, or term of endearment.
I’m phoning them for the first time in years, and maybe ever, to reveal what they don’t know and what I’ve spent six months trying to figure out — that Epifania, their grandmother, was likely in a clandestine study called the Human Tissue Analysis Program, that there was a class-action lawsuit regarding the program that settled in 2010, and that their grandmother might be the Trucheña I’ve been chasing ever since I first caught wind of her from a nuclear activist, Jay Coghlan.
Nora answers my call and I dive in: “Just hang in there, this is going to sound wild,” I tell her. After listening for a few seconds, there’s a scramble, and suddenly Cecilia is on the line, too. If the mystery woman is Epifania, I tell them, she had by far the most plutonium in her body of any other New Mexico resident who was autopsied as part of that macabre program.
It all nervously spills out. And while Epifania fits the bill, I add, I need to cross-check the information and confirm it’s her through whatever medical records I can get my hands on.
Several seconds go by before Cecilia responds. This might explain things, she says. Another pause. It might explain, she continues, “why so many in the family have gotten cancer.” She begins to run down the list.
“My oldest brother, Sam, died of multiple myeloma. Susie had pancreatic cancer. My mom died of pancreatic cancer. Nora got pancreatic cancer, which is metastatic, so she now suffers from lung cancer. Mary Helen and I have both had breast cancer. And Henry had prostate cancer.” Only one sibling, Bernice, was spared. (Cecilia and Nora said they had genetic testing for both pancreatic and breast cancer risk that showed those cancers were not hereditary.)
I’m shocked. The only time I’ve heard of such a pervasive history of cancer is in conversations with Tina Cordova, Bernice Gutierrez and Mary Martinez White, all members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who lived within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated. But this is different. Truchas is 225 miles from Trinity. How did a woman living at that distance end up with such an extraordinary amount of plutonium in her liver?
As I keep talking to the two sisters, I realize the answer might lie closer to home — Los Alamos.
Cosme was the only one in the family who worked at the lab. That he could have unwittingly carried home undetectable radioactive particles on his clothing and boots and trigger illness throughout the family had long flickered in the Romeros’ minds. But they never could have guessed that Epifania might be the bellwether. She lived to the age of 91 — no small feat — and did not suffer from cancer herself. But over the long arc of time, almost everyone around her did.
I can’t help but apologize to Nora and Cecilia for opening up this can of worms, an old wound made new again. But Nora is matter of fact. “You know what?” she says. “It’s better for us to know.”
We decide to meet in person, and three days later, I’m sitting at Cecilia’s kitchen table in Santa Fe, joined by Nora and Mary Helen, the youngest sister. They’ve assembled a thick white binder filled with pristine, decades-old documents, many from Cosme’s time at the lab. One of them is a pale blue booklet from what was once known as the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union of America, still in its original plastic sleeve. They’ve also found out something else: Cosme worked at Technical Area 8, a “hot site.”
Rare photos from TA-8
Technical Area 8, also known as Gun Site, was named after the gun-type design used in Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The War Department built the facility off of Los Alamos’s West Jemez Road, complete with three “bombproof” concrete buildings and a firing range for scientists to study projectiles and ballistics. Research there involved “high explosives, plutonium, uranium, arsenic, lithium hydride, and titanium oxide,” as one lab document read.
Cosme did custodial work at the lab, including at TA-8, from 1950 to 1970, dates he faithfully documented in an Atomic Energy Commission personal security questionnaire he saved. But beyond that, official personnel records about him are difficult, if not impossible, to find, especially since he worked for a lab subcontractor called the Zia Company. If he was exposed to radioactive materials, there was almost zero chance I’d uncover the documents to prove it.
But in truth, the Zia Company rewarded people who took on high-risk jobs, according to nuclear historian Lucie Anne Genay. Working in areas with nuclear materials could add a 10 percent bump in pay, and extra-hazardous jobs could earn employees up to double their base wage.
Incredibly, given the secrecy at Los Alamos, the family has a handful of photos of Cosme at work there. They show him wearing a personal radiation badge — one major clue. But what the badge measured or what, exactly, he cleaned is either lost to time or entirely secret. Perhaps he didn’t know very much himself. Or if he did, he revealed little to his wife and children.
All of this seems like one sprawling thought experiment. What, precisely, did Cosme do at the lab? And could he have brought home the plutonium that affected Epifania?
I’m aware of other instances of second-hand contamination — workers bringing asbestos home on their clothing, exposing family members to tiny harmful fibers, or even nuclear laundry workers exposed to radiation on the job. Safety measures at LANL have changed since Cosme’s time and today include shielding, protective clothing, air sampling, radiation safety evaluations and other precautions, all aimed at safeguarding workers, the environment and the community, according to LANL spokespeople.
Nevertheless, safety lapses do happen, and Los Alamos workers have expressed concerns about tracking home toxic substances — and invisible radioactive material — on their clothing and boots. Their concerns aren’t baseless: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has recorded instances of radioactive “take-home toxins.” How many times might workers have taken toxins home and never known?
“I’ve visited hundreds of nuclear workers’ homes over the years, possibly thousands,” says Marco Kaltofen, a specialist in nuclear forensics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who wrote a 2018 report on nuclear workers’ house dust. “It is a fairly simple matter to tell what an employee is working on from looking at the contamination we find in their laundry room,” he tells me by phone in November.
Much of his work, in fact, is about piecing together a contamination scenario by analyzing house and environmental dust. According to Kaltofen, scanning electron microscopy combined with energy dispersive X-ray analysis (or SEM/EDS) can identify particulates so small that they may go undetected by other means. The technology can answer other questions too, like whether the radioactive matter is natural or industrial and, if industrial, the nuclear facility where it originated. It can even identify what warhead the material came from, Kaltofen says. In his 2018 research, he uncovered “fugitive radioactive particles” in several homes and a vehicle belonging to workers at LANL, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the former Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.
“There’s a shape, a morphology, that goes with almost any kind of material that you learn to recognize,” he says. Plutonium that has been heated a couple hundred million degrees by a nuclear detonation looks like a metal droplet; specks from a uranium mine look like tiny, spiky rocks. If machined for a warhead, thorium, another radioactive metal, might look like a microscopic curlicue. Knowing the sizes and shapes of each can help determine whether they’re small enough to pass through the bloodstream and eventually get excreted or stay in the body forever, carving a path of cell damage along the way.
It would be of little consequence that Cosme — who died in 1984 of a cerebral hemorrhage, another condition with possible links to cumulative exposure — retired from the lab over 50 years ago. The kind of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons, plutonium 239, has a 24,000-year radioactive half-life. With that lifespan, the particles could still be present today in a forgotten corner of an attic, cellar or basement, Kaltofen says. Radioactive dust is not only a “potential source of internal radiation exposure to nuclear site workers,” his report warned: It could also expose their families “via secondary contamination.”
Plutonium and cancer
Health studies have shown that residents downwind of the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, where plutonium was first produced at full-scale, have high incidences of all cancers, including uterine, ovarian, cervical and breast.
There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to ionizing radiation, which includes alpha particles emitted by plutonium, is linked to an increase in pancreatic cancer. Additional research at LANL — the unpublished Zia Study — posits that increased radiation exposure among male employees between 1946 and 1978 led to increased rates of pancreatic cancer deaths. Any cumulative exposure to low doses of radiation is associated with higher risks of death by cancer, recent research shows.
But contamination, for all the fear it conjures, is elusive. When it happens — if it happens — the effects can take years to manifest and depend on one’s biological sex and age at exposure. If there is one indisputable fact, it’s that females are more harmed by radiation, especially if they are exposed at a young age, according to Mary Olson, biologist and founder of the Gender and Radiation Impact Project. Children are the most vulnerable, she noted in a 2019 report, because “their bodies are growing and since cells are dividing faster, DNA is more likely to be injured.”
It’s almost too easy to think of all the ways the Romero children, and the cousins who occasionally lived with them, could have come into contact with radioactive dust, and how their bodies, still growing, could have been poisoned.
The last clue
It has now been six months since I began searching for the mysterious Trucheña. And though I’m 90 percent sure she is Epifania, I have yet to find any official documents tying her to the autopsy program. The only way I’ll be convinced that she is indeed the unnamed Truchas housewife in the LAHDRA study is if I find her autopsy report or some other record with clear proof.
Mary Helen, Nora and Cecilia want to find the answers as well, so we jointly decide to make a trip to Los Alamos Medical Center to request a copy of their grandmother’s autopsy report.
We’re thwarted almost as soon as we get there. Two attendants tell us that Epifania’s records will be long gone, given that she died 51 years ago. Then they offer slightly better news: It should at least be possible to confirm that she was once a patient. But after several confusing minutes, they can’t find any evidence whatsoever that Epifania was ever at LAMC, even though her granddaughters remember her last dying days here and even though we hold the copy of her death certificate, which proves that fact.
We walk down the hall to Dr. R.W. Honsinger’s office, the physician who signed her death certificate in 1972 and who, miraculously, is still practicing medicine. His staff tell us that her records don’t exist here, either. I call the Office of the Medical Investigator at the University of New Mexico from the hospital gift shop. Again, no dice.
“She existed,” Nora says quietly, “but the records don’t.”
Mary Helen volunteers to come with me to the courthouse the following Monday in a final act of desperation. Maybe we’ll find a list of the autopsied in the class-action lawsuit that will resolve this once and for all. I’ve already logged two days there and clicked through about 1,500 pages of documents, but there are thousands of pages left to read. We arrive in the early afternoon and quickly divide up the labor. Within 30 minutes, Mary Helen waves her hands at me and points at the computer screen.
“There’s my Grandma.”
The list she’s been scouring is three pages long with 356 names — and she’s found her in the last column of the second page: Epifania Trujillo. Seeing her name among the court records is definite proof — Epifania was unlawfully autopsied as part of the Human Tissue Analysis Program.
We stare at the page in a state of disbelief, hug and then print the only hard evidence I’ve seen that gives Epifania a name and not a case number.
All the wrenching news at once
My last question is one I pursue a few days later: Why wasn’t Epifania’s family included in the class-action? The lawsuit ended in 2010, awarding a total of $10.1 million to over 400 plaintiffs’ families.
When I pose that question to one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, John C. Bienvenu, he tells me it was difficult to hunt down all the people affected. The lab was ordered to provide a list of the deceased as part of the discovery process, he says, but there was no telling whether the list was complete, since even the lab did not have records of certain patients’ identities. And while an out-of-state settlement services company sent out letters with information about the lawsuit — that is, if next of kin could be found — the only other means of tracking people down was by radio and newspaper advertisements, which Mary Helen, Nora and Cecilia never recall hearing or seeing. They would have had to suspect that their grandma was the subject of such a morbid program in the first place, and they never did.
Indeed, it’s not until over a decade after the suit was settled that the Romeros get all the wrenching news at once: Their father might have brought home toxic plutonium on his work clothes; their grandmother was unlawfully autopsied; the family was left out of the settlement altogether; and Los Alamos had a hand in all of it. Epifania, emblematic of so much, fell through the cracks in every way possible.
Closing the circle
Everything I know about Epifania, I know because of her granddaughters — her hand-rolled cigarettes and the way she liked to smoke them, her love of quilting and devotion to her faith. When I visit with them for the last time, it’s in Truchas. Snow is falling and the Truchas Peaks are shrouded in a thick fog. Their family home is less than a mile away from where I grew up.
First, we sit at the kitchen table, then Mary Helen, Cecilia and Nora usher me to the two-room cabin that Cosme, Epifania’s son-in law, built in the backyard. She spent her nights there but ate every meal with the family and washed her clothes with theirs. Mary Helen remembers their first washing machine — the vintage type that had to be hand fed; an automatic one was installed later.
By the time she died, Epifania had chronic pulmonary interstitial fibrosis, a scarring of the lung tissue that she’d lived with for years, her death certificate said. Perhaps it was caused by inhaling tiny specks of plutonium, which some researchers have associated with the disease, or perhaps by smoking. No one will ever know.
The women have already shared so much with me, so I decide to bring something of my own to share with them: a pale pink quilt that I’ve had for as long as I can remember, created, as I’ve always believed, by their mother, Carmelita. My Grandpa Gilbert won it in a church raffle and, somewhere along the way, it was passed down to me. It’s been almost everywhere I’ve lived and it’s starting to fray. Cecilia confirms her mom made it, but to my amazement, she also tells me that at least some of the stitching looked to be the handiwork of her Grandma Epifania.
As if to complete the circle, Cecilia hands me a 30-year-old polaroid of my own great-grandmother, Juanita Montoya, probably taken by Susie, the oldest Romero sister, now deceased. My grandma is sitting in her favorite green chair somewhere around her 100th birthday. I can still remember it. The women found the photo while digging through a trove of family albums.
One of their own prized family photos is a black and white snapshot of Epifania from the early 1950s. She’s wearing a white apron and shucking peas from the garden on the front porch. Carmelita is sitting next to her with a wide grin and Cecilia, Nora, Mary Helen, Susie and Bernice, all young girls at the time, are scattered around her feet. Epifania is beaming.
As I look at the photo, I see that she is the sum of an entire life. She is loved. She is surrounded by family. She is much more than the unspeakable acts committed against her.
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