Coroners’ Web Site Solves Family Mystery

Michael Lowery died alone, behind the locked door of a downtown Los Angeles hotel that cost him $74.10 a week. Nobody noticed he was dead for a few days. He was just 57, but he was tired, and the drifters who knew him say that is what did him in.

In a quiet way, however, Lowery’s April 1999 death was a landmark.

Coroner’s officials in Los Angeles County say Lowery’s sister, who had been searching for him for 10 years, found him listed on an unusual Internet database--https://www.unclaimedpersons.com--that is attracting growing interest among law enforcement officers across California.

She became the first relative to be reunited, albeit in death, with a relative through the Web site, which contains information on hundreds of people whose bodies have not been claimed in recent years.

“There were mixed feelings when I found him on the Internet, but it was wonderful in a way,” his sister, 63-year-old Shirley McNeal, said Tuesday from her home in Newark, N.J.

“It was sort of a relief to know how he died. We weren’t sure if he had been murdered. We were just hoping that he hadn’t been hurt. It’s good to know that he died from natural causes.”

Coroners say it’s one of the more frustrating aspects of their job: routinely, people die, officials learn the person’s identity, but no one comes forward to claim the body. It happens more than 250 times each year in Los Angeles County alone, said Doyle Tolbert, an investigator in the county coroner’s office.

“The picture of the cops pounding the beat and knocking on doors--that’s what we used to do,” Tolbert, who has worked at the coroner’s office for 14 years, said. “Now I can work on five or six cases at a time without walking away. The Internet has become a tool we can’t do without, and this is why.”

Family members searching for relatives can use the Social Security death index, but that site typically requires them to know the relative’s Social Security number. There are other Internet sites that offer information on missing people, but officials believe this is the first site of its kind to offer information specifically about deceased people whose identities are known.

San Bernardino County coroners launched the site in April 1999, and several other coroner departments in California have joined the effort, including Los Angeles County. And late last month, Tolbert’s telephone rang. It was Shirley McNeal.

McNeal had lost touch with her brother after their mother died 11 years ago. As he had done several times before, Lowery, the youngest of five siblings, simply packed a bag shortly after the funeral and left a note. “He just said he was going to California,” McNeal said.

McNeal searched in vain.

Her brother had become a “loner and a drifter,” Tolbert said. For the last five years, he had been living at the Madison Hotel, a boarding house on East 7th Street. Doctors had amputated his big toes because of diabetes, said hotel manager Bob Hoye. Overweight and stricken with clogged arteries, Lowery was having trouble walking.

“I sensed him getting tired at the end,” Hoye said.

In April 1999, about the same time the Web site was launched, Lowery’s acquaintances in the hotel realized they hadn’t seen him for several days. Managers entered his room and found him dead of a heart attack.

Investigators, through fingerprints and other clues, learned Lowery’s name, knew that he was born in Columbus, Ohio, and even knew the names of his parents. But his parents were dead too, they learned, his relatives had all left Ohio, and he hadn’t been in touch with relatives for years.

“We had everything,” Tolbert said. “But we came up empty.”

After placing the name in the new Internet database, investigators had to wait more than a year. This summer, McNeal had started reading a series of books by Patricia Cornwell. The author, a former analyst in a Virginia medical examiner’s office, uses a medical examiner as a recurring character.

“At 2 a.m. one morning, I woke up and I thought: ‘Coroners. I haven’t tried that.’ I realized that I had been looking for missing people, not missing bodies. So I got on the computer and found my way into the Web site. And there he was.”

Learning details of Lowery’s death gave McNeal some peace of mind. She was especially pleased to learn that coroners had Lowery, who served in the U.S. Army from 1960 to 1963, buried in the Riverside National Cemetery.

In October, McNeal is scheduled to move to Nevada with her husband, she said. Once she arrives, she plans to visit her brother’s grave.

“It was hard not knowing,” she said. “I just shook my head that I was able to find it on the Web.”