By SOFIA SANCHEZ, The Island Packet
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. (AP) — In 2009, while scouring the web to piece together any information she could on her missing brother, Ruth Bueso got here across an article within the Island Packet announcing he had died two years earlier.
In her first email to Tim Donnelly and Daniel Brownstein, the previous Island Packet reporters who had written the story, she attached a photograph of her brother, 42-year-old Hector Bueso Mejía.
“Please, I want to know if he is similar person,” she said.
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In November 2007, Bueso had been homeless and living on Hilton Head Island. The day he was found, his friend, Charles “Michael” Ballard, also homeless, went to examine on him in a wooded area behind a Shell gas station on William Hilton Parkway, in response to a Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office report on the time. Just before, Bueso had been within the hospital for nine days for liver problems. When Ballard got there, he couldn’t wake him.
For years, the Bueso family in Honduras had no idea what had turn into of their brother. They knew he was working as a painter in Savannah, Georgia, and that he had met a woman, Ruth Bueso said, that’s all they knew.
His calls home weren’t unusual and he ceaselessly sent a refund to his mother, Alba Mejía, and nine other siblings in Honduras. To them, Bueso was the intense older brother consistently nagging them to assist clean up the home who only loosened up when he was playing the guitar.
“He was at all times fearful because he was the third oldest,” Ruth said. “He went to the U.S. pondering he would help us because we were very poor.”
It wasn’t until after her other brother, the oldest, had passed away in 2009 that their mother had had enough.
“’Find him,’ she told me, so I went on the web and I had hope,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine it after I found (the article). I understand English, though not much. I cried and cried.”
After checking out he was dead, she and her sister couldn’t bring themselves to inform their mother. Once they finally told her, she was devastated. The family set to work to bring their brother home, but they couldn’t afford it.
After a few years and dead ends, his stays were finally picked up by a friend of the family in June 2021, and returned to the family in September 2022.
On Sept. 18, 2022, Brownstein and Donnelly — who had long moved on to other jobs outside the realm — got one other message from Ruth Bueso.
“I only wish to inform you that the ashes of my brother are finally home, 15 years later,” she said. “Thanks for the news, otherwise we’d not have discovered what happened to (him).”
Hearing of Bueso’s return was surprising after over a decade of silence, Brownstein and Donnelly said.
“His family had no idea what happened to their loved one,” said Brownstein who now lives in Charleston together with his wife and kids. “I hope that this brought them some extent of closure and peace. As a parent, I cannot imagine not knowing what happened to your child.”
Donelly read the e-mail message on his phone in Recent York, where he now lives, waiting outside a food market, holding his and his girlfriend’s bikes while she went inside a food market. He was emotional reading the e-mail from Bueso’s grateful sister as music and the sounds of town whirred within the background.
“We tell stories on a regular basis and if you happen to may also help real people … that, to me, is the very best type of journalism,” Donnelly said. “It doesn’t change missing him or anything of their lives, but it surely gives them closure.”
Learning the reality of how her brother lived out his final days was devastating for his or her family, but having him back has brought a way of “calm” for them, Ruth Bueso said.
“Now nothing can take that pain, but it surely’s higher having him home,” she said. “It’s vital to have him here.”
Bueso’s story is one which weighed heavily on each Brownstein and Donnelly, who used it on the time to shine a light-weight on Hilton Head’s poor and indicate the tough “underbelly” of an affluent town, Donnelly said.
“Another day, it will have been a one-liner in a police blotter, but I believe we realized this was an even bigger story,” he said. “The unhoused on Hilton Head are never seen or discussed … it’s an element of island life that you just never hear about.”
Bueso’s ashes were picked up, coincidentally, just because the Beaufort County Coroner’s Office was preparing to inter unclaimed stays, some that spanned back to the Eighties, in a mausoleum purchased by the county at Forest Lawn Cemetery. The office was in a position to make contact with next of kin of over half of the 61 unclaimed stays sitting on their shelves.
Deputy Coroner Debbie Youmans ran point on the project and spent months with dozens of files piled on her desk. Ultimately, the ashes of 34 people whose families either couldn’t be reached or didn’t come forward to retrieve them remained. They were laid to rest in 2021 within the mausoleum while 4, who were veterans, were entombed in a ceremony with military honors at Beaufort National Cemetery.
Today, there are several avenues to exhaust including social media, ancestry and genealogy web sites, she said. In 2007, nonetheless, that was not the case.
“It’s very difficult to attempt to get in contact with families in foreign countries,” Youmans said. “It was loads of trail-chasing. The highlight of the day for me was at all times when someone was claimed.”
While the grief of the Bueso Mejía family is not any less painful, having his stays returned house is “as glad an ending” to his story as there will be, Donnelly said.
“I believe we ended the story (in 2007) with the road, ‘Until Hector gets claimed, he can be waiting on a shelf for someone,’” Donnelly said. “Now, he has the dignity of getting somewhere where he is needed and belongs.”
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