By Joanne Faryon/inewsource
They call him Garage for short. His full name is Sixty-Six Garage — after the place the van he was traveling in was taken after it crashed near the Mexican border about 100 miles east of San Diego in June 1999.
Or so the story goes.
No one knows for sure, but it’s the lore that’s the personal history of a man who has lived anonymously on life support for more than 15 years, longer than almost all of the other residents at the Villa Coronado Skilled Nursing Facility.
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Jane and John Does live on life support in California nursing homes, sometimes for decades. [/box][/one_half]
Garage, somewhere in his mid-30s, is severely brain damaged. He can’t speak. He doesn’t respond to his environment, but he can sometimes follow movement with his large brown eyes. He spends almost all of his days and nights in a bed in the corner of a room that he shares with two roommates — also on life support and non-responsive. He has a feeding tube in his stomach and a breathing tube in his throat.
“We all wonder: ‘Where did you come from?’ ” said Ed Kirkpatrick, director of the Coronado nursing home. “Did you graduate from high school, what was your life like?”
An inewsource investigation last year revealed there are more than 4,000 people living on special life support units across California. Garage is one of eight, according to the state, whose identities are unknown.
Garage’s care, about $700 a day, is covered by Medi-Cal, the state’s program for the poor and disabled. A section in the Medi-Cal policy manual allows Jane and John Does to qualify for care when they are comatose or in some other way incompetent.
There are also provisions in state policy that allow Medi-Cal to pay for long-term care for undocumented residents, a spokesman for the state told inewsource last October.
“My understanding is that he was living in Mexico (and) crossed the border illegally,” said Marc Steingart, a social worker at Villa Coronado.
Garage, likely a teenager at the time, was in a van when it crashed near the U.S.-Mexico border near El Centro. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrown from the vehicle, according to medical records. He was eventually transferred to the UC San Diego trauma center in Hillcrest.
He spent a year in the hospital.
That’s where he was given the name Sixty-Six Garage. A hospital spokesperson says it’s common for patients who are not alert or awake – who have no ID – to be assigned a random name until their identities are known.
The fake names generate a medical record number so doctors can order medications and tests without delays. In the case of Sixty-Six Garage, his real identity was never learned and the name stayed with him.
“Rumor has it that when the van was in bad disrepair it was taken to the city (impound) where they fix vans that were in accidents. The name of the garage… was 66 Garage,” Steingart said.
inewsource first reported the story of an anonymous man on life support last October, when a woman in Texas petitioned the Mexican consulate, believing the man might be her brother. After the DNA test proved the two were not a match, Villa Coronado allowed inewsource to film the man and reveal more of his story in hopes of learning his identity.
Since he’s been at Villa Coronado, seven people have come forward, believing Garage was a relative. The Texas woman, Yolanda Ibarra Lara, was the most recent.
Her brother — Gilberto Ceron Lara — went missing some 16 years ago trying to cross the border from Mexico into the U.S.
“He did have a lot of similarities with my brother,” Ibarra Lara said through a translator.
“Almost everyone was almost sure that it was him because they coincided in a lot of things, the age, the time they’d been missing, “ Ibarra Lara said.
The Border Patrol reports that hundreds of migrants are found dead every year along the U.S. – Mexican border. Many are never identified, according to the Colibrí Center for Human Rights in Arizona. The Center currently has a database of 1,500 missing people last seen near the border.
Ibarra Lara traveled to San Diego to see Garage last October while waiting for DNA test results.
“I’ll never forget his face,” she said. “When he saw me, he took my hand and he squeezed very hard. Maybe he tried to tell me that he’s not my brother but for me to help him find his family.”
Kirkpatrick is part of the team of administrators and doctors who make all of Garage’s health care decisions. He said it’s the nursing home’s job to keep Garage alive, “and to keep him at his highest state of being” However, Garage has a do not resuscitate (DNR) order in place.
“If certain things were to happen (and) his heart stopped… we would not be continuing… life sustaining measures,” Kirkpatrick said.
Given his youth, Garage could continue to live on life support for another 15 years, Kirkpatrick said.
Steingart, who was Garage’s social worker several years ago, tried to legally change his name.
“Calling someone by that name is certainly not dignified,” Steingart said.
But the name change would have jeopardized his Medi-Cal benefits, Steingart said, because he’s already registered in the system as Sixty-Six Garage.
Last year, inewsource published a special report, An Impossible Choice, which examined the agonizing decisions families make on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves and have not made known their wishes for end-of-life care. A relative can decide to withdraw life support when there is no hope for recovery, but inewsource found a system in which the default is to keep people alive at all cost.
inewsource reporter Leo Castaneda contributed to this report.
Here we go again — another inewsource story about an unfortunate human being housed at Sharp Hospital’s Villa Coronado Nursing Facility. A follow-up on last Fall’s shockingly graphic series about numerous helpless people consigned to living in this place.
This time, oddly, parent agency Sharp Hospital is not identified. Indeed, this time the patient is not named either because he arrived anonymously after a debilitating car crash. No one knows who he is, though he has been assigned an admittedly disrespectful impersonal moniker. This time there are no Sharp Villa Coronado physicians going on the record, openly discussing their patients’ cases. This time no one filmed invasive medical procedures.This time no one callously refers to the nursing home as a “vent farm,”not even once.
So what’s the point of this story, inewsource? Are you claiming a humane purpose — that you hope to locate the family of this unfortunate man? Or does Sharp Hospital want to locate next-of-kin to share expenses for his care? Do you cite costs because Sharp Hospital wants the State of California to limit how much money hospitals are required to pay to maintain such patients?
This story is very troubling for me too, but it’s an important issue and I’m glad it’s being covered. I also think that Joanne has overall covered this in a respectful manner.
This opened my eyes to realizing I don’t want to be sustained if I am in a state like this and need to do the proper legal work to ensure that. It also makes me realize these delicate issues need to be discussed with my family members, because when you wait until it’s too late there is nothing you can do. Furthermore, maybe the media attention would get the attention of a family member of this man who doesn’t know where he is and what his condition is and they can come visit him.
I wish the world was all about sports, celebrities and politics – but it’s not and the news has to tackle some heavy issues.
Peking_Duck, you are refusing to walk a mile in the other man’s moccasins — helpless hospitalized adult patients whose names and faces were identified and filmed for public consumption. San Diego State’s Inewsource.org and KPBS in collaboration with Sharp Hospital are responsible for these exploitive and unethical stories. In this case, the incapacitated patient was anonymous and presumably an undocumented Mexican. The tone was milder than in the “Impossible Choice” series from last Fall, but there was nothing “respectful” about any of it.
Sharp Villa Coronado facility does not have patients on ventilators. Not one. All the patients breathe on their own. Shame on Sharp Coronado for allowing such an inaccurate story. Shows you can’t believe everything you read in the newsN
he is not on a ventilator. He is on blowby oxygen with a trach.
He isn’t on a ventilator. He is on blow by oxygen with a trach. Sub acute is the Villa building.
$5 MILLION spent keeping this illegal turnip breathing. Ship his carcass back to Mexico and send the Mexican government a bill!