FORT WORTH, Texas _ For 12 years, John Almendarez's unidentified body was buried in a Houston pauper's cemetery under a grave marked "ML02-2230."
He was a father who shared his love of baseball and the Astros with his five daughters. They didn't see him again after a Father's Day visit in 2002.
His middle child, Alice Almendarez, was a teenager at the time and took on the heavy load of trying to find her father. She said police offered little help and the search often felt hopeless, even once leaving her in the morgue shouting for help. It consumed her life for more than a decade.
Unbeknownst to her, the only clue to the biggest mystery of her life was buried inside the Harris County Cemetery, which she drove past nearly every day.
But in 2014, she learned about NamUS _ a national clearinghouse and database for missing and unidentified deceased people headquartered in Fort Worth.
Once she discovered the clearinghouse, it took only six months for Almendarez to learn her father drowned in the Buffalo Bayou close to his home and that his body was found on July 2, 2002.
Only eight states require criminal justice agencies to enter case information into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Texas is not one of them.
Almendarez hopes that her 12 years of hell will lead to a law in Texas that would require that kind of data entry from Texas law enforcement agencies, and therefore alleviate the pain of other families. She has started to gather information and contact lawmakers to see what steps she could make in proposing the legislation.
But she's hopeful.
