1/12 THREAD: The 911 call came into the U.S. Border Patrol’s station in Tucson, Arizona, around midnight. Joselino Gomez Esteban’s voice crackled through from somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. He said he was lost. He needed help. His nephew had collapsed and wouldn’t respond. 
2/12 The Sonoran is the final stretch of a 2,000 mile migration from Guatemala. Each year, hundreds die trying to cross to the U.S. from Mexico. The Border Patrol tallied 294 deaths in fiscal year 2017, but experts believe the figure is far higher. Some who die are never found.
3/12 Finding Gomez, 43, and his nephew, Misael Paiz, 25 proved difficult. The older cell phone Gomez used didn’t provide GPS coordinates.
4/12 The Tucson Border Patrol sector is responsible for 262 miles of sweeping deserts and canyons. Gomez and Paiz could have been anywhere here. Agents weren’t even sure they were on the U.S. side of the border.
5/12 @Reuters pieced together accounts of what led to this moment. Paiz had been a restaurant cook who hoped to find work in the U.S. Two weeks earlier, he and his uncle had set off from Aguacate, a struggling Guatemalan farming town.
6/12 After crossing the border and walking for about six hours, Paiz began to complain of a severe headache. He collapsed next to a dirt track called Cemetery Road.
7/12 His uncle’s efforts to revive him failed. Their guide left with three other migrants. Gomez placed the 911 call. They told him to light a fire to guide the rescuers – but it burned hot and clean, making little smoke.
8/12 Border agents finally found the men. They took Gomez into custody. They took Paiz’s body away in a black body bag.
9/12 The Pima County Medical Examiner found that Paiz succumbed to heat stroke. Seven weeks after his death, the Guatemalan government paid for his body to be flown home. It arrived with half a dozen others, all bearing remains of Guatemalan migrants.
10/12 In Aguacate, some 250 people met the ambulance transporting Paiz's body. They stood in ankle-deep mud and pouring rain as eight men lifted his coffin out and took it into the family home.
11/12 ‘We always played together. We would go to the mountains together to collect wood,’ said Gaspar, his twin. ‘We discussed which one of us would go to the U.S. and decided it would be Misael.’
12/12 A cross now stands where Paiz died. Artist Alvaro Enciso has placed over 800 similar crosses, each marking a dead migrant, in the Arizona desert. Read story here reut.rs/2DH624O @lucy_nicholson @Jane_Reuters & Andrew Hay
