Body on bridge ID’d, but mystery still unsolved

During the early hours of a warm summer morning last year, a Washington State Patrol trooper stopped to check on an unattended pickup parked along Interstate 82 northeast of Selah when he spotted something alarming: a body on the Fred G. Redmon Bridge.

Closer examination revealed a nude body decomposed beyond recognition on the road’s shoulder about midway across the bridge on that July 15 morning. Markings along a concrete barrier suggest that someone attempted to push the body off the bridge, which is 300 feet above Selah Creek.

On Monday, eight months later, authorities finally confirmed through DNA samples that the body was that of 33-year-old Vicente Rodriguez-Carrillo of Toppenish.

But how he died and who left his body on the bridge remains a mystery.

“Obviously he didn’t walk out there and just lie down and pass away,” Yakima County Coroner Jack Hawkins said. “He died someplace else, three, four days earlier, and somebody took him out there. Somebody was trying to put him over the side of the bridge.

“So, you’ve got a body dump, and you just don’t do that. Somebody knows something.”

Despite the circumstances, Hawkins said Rodriguez-Carrillo’s death cannot be ruled a homicide. An autopsy did not reveal a clear cause of death.

“We just don’t know,” he said. “He could have died of natural causes and someone was just disposing of the body. Hopefully the detectives will be able to trace it back down and find out who was involved.”

Rodriguez-Carrillo goes missing

Griselda Medrano, Rodriguez-Carrillo’s girlfriend, said the last time she saw him was July 9 at her Toppenish home.

She said he promised to go to Seattle with her on July 13 but never showed. He didn’t return calls or text messages seeking to confirm the trip.

Additional calls and text messages remained unanswered over the next several days, she said.

“Like every three, four days, I’d call him,” she said. “At first you could hear the phone ringing. Then a week later, it was off. I hear nothing else.”

About 683 miles away in Salt Lake City, Rodriguez-Carrillo’s brother was also worried after not hearing from him.

“He would call on a daily basis, and one day he just stopped,” said Margarita Rodriguez, Rodriguez-Carrillo’s niece. “I remember (family members) being worried week after week because it was not OK. Then my dad would ask, ‘Can you check the internet, can you check to see if he’s been deported,’ because we’re from Mexico. We didn’t find anything.”

So on Sept. 3, on behalf of her family, Margarita Rodriguez reported to Toppenish police that her uncle was missing.

On Sept. 9, a detective told her he’d be working the case.

A month later, Rodriguez-Carrillo’s parents, who live in Elko, Nev., were asked to submit DNA samples at the local police department, and were swabbed on Oct. 10, Margarita Rodriguez said.

“The day they told us they needed DNA, the next morning we went,” she said. “It was on the spot – no delays.”

A forensic probe

When Yakima County Sheriff’s deputies first responded to the call from the state trooper, they thought Rodriguez-Carrillo’s body had been doused with gasoline or some flammable liquid and burned, Hawkins said.

A hazardous materials team even responded, he said.

“People really didn’t know what they had,” he recalled. “His skin was burned. Not by fire, but the elements, the sun. It burned badly.”

Hawkins, in his report, said Rodriguez-Carrillo’s body suffered second-degree burns. An autopsy found no clear signs of foul play in his death, Hawkins said.

“No gunshot wounds, no knifing, no beating – we had him X-rayed, so no broken bones,” he said. “It was really kind of puzzling because we have a deceased male, and even after the autopsy we have no cause of death or even a manner of death.”

Hawkins said Rodriguez-Carrillo had no dental records, and couldn’t be identified that way.

On July 26, Hawkins sent skeletal remains and blood from the body to forensic anthropologist Kathy Taylor of the King County Medical Examiner’s office. She entered DNA from those samples into nationwide databases and also started working with an artist to reconstruct facial features in an effort to identify the body.

Meanwhile, Hawkins said he received numerous inquiries from people worried about missing loved ones. None were a match.

“It’s very frustrating when you find an individual like that,” Hawkins said. “We get a lot of calls of who it might be. We checked in with a lot of people to find out who this guy was. It’s just a matter of finding the right person.”

While Taylor helped with facial reconstruction, DNA databases were being combed in hopes of finding a match.

On March 20, Rodriguez-Carrillo’s parents’ DNA was matched.

“It takes a lot of people to get these things put together, and that’s why it takes so long to identify these people,” Hawkins said.

Only half the equation

On March 22, Margarita Rodriguez’s father drove five hours from their Salt Lake City home to Elko to tell his parents that the man found on the bridge outside Selah was his brother – their son.

“It was hard, but at the same time it’s a release,” Margarita Rodriguez said. “I talked to my grandpa and he said it’s hard but at least he has a body to pray for, knowing that he won’t be out (wondering) the rest of his life.”

Rodriguez-Carrillo was living in Idaho before moving to Toppenish about two years ago. He worked for a dairy farm in the area, and never married or had children, his niece said.

He enjoyed horses and rodeos, and had a horse of his own that he kept at a friend’s near Toppenish. He will always be remembered as a loving, caring man, Margarita Rodriguez said.

Medrano, his girlfriend, said Rodriguez-Carrillo often watched her four children while she worked late nights in fruit-packing houses, and sometimes would try to convince her to skip work so they could go to dinner and dancing.

Margarita Rodriguez said she knew the body discovered on the bridge outside Selah was her uncle from the time news broke about it.

“I just needed them to tell me that was him,” she said. “I just knew that it was him. I was having my family calling me every day for updates.”

But confirmation that it was her uncle only brings partial closure, she said.

“You close that door, which is great because you know he’s not out there,” she said. “But now there’s another door open; we want to know what happened. It’s not done. We need to know who did it.”

“I know he wasn’t a perfect person, but nobody deserves that. No one deserves to be thrown out like a piece of garbage.”