Los Angeles County has thousands of ‘unclaimed dead.’ These investigators retrace their lives

Martirosyan acts as a living representative of those Los Angeles County calls “the unclaimed dead.” She is one of more than a dozen investigators who work for the Public Administrator, an understaffed and little-known branch of the county’s Department of the Treasurer and Tax Collector.

Her job is to unearth who the woman was beneath all her belongings and find out who she loved, who loved her and what she wanted after her death.

Martirosyan and her colleagues spend three years investigating a case before relinquishing the deceased to a communal gravesite, a last resort in the county cemetery. Similar work is done in cities across the U.S. but in Los Angeles, with one of the nation’s largest homeless populations, the efforts are particularly difficult.

It is a painstaking process to retrace a life. Investigators, who handle about 200 cases yearly, are given a manila file folder containing a name, birthdate and little else for each death.

“I go through their lives in so many ways,” Martirosyan said. “They do become mine.”