No Address, No Next of Kin: Homeless in Life, Anonymous in Death

Days passed in each case without the police or the medical examiner identifying the bodies. In the middle of a teeming metropolis, the two men seemed to be living off the grid and alienated from loved ones.

No frantic co-workers or family members contacted the police to say someone they knew was missing.

Their unsettling deaths revealed the anonymity that shrouds the homeless and others living marginal lives in New York City.

The street can swallow people whole until they blend into their surroundings, ignored or tolerated by passersby. Many do not carry a driver’s license or other identification and avoid giving their names to social workers or the police, out of fear or shame, advocates for the homeless said.

“There’s people in the street that don’t care, because no one cares about them,” said Eddie Ramos, 56, a homeless man whose job is to reach out to his peers who need help with alcohol and drug abuse.

By Thursday morning, investigators confirmed the name of the man beaten to death in Chinatown two weeks ago: He was Florencio Moran, 39.

The medical examiner and the police said they still had not officially determined the identity of the man who was discovered Monday in the manhole near Columbus Circle.

The delay in identifying the men highlights the immense difficulties the police face when investigating deaths among the estimated 3,600 people living on the streets in New York City.

Investigators said they had little information about Moran, beyond records of arrests for criminal weapons possession and public drinking. Detectives have been unable to locate anyone in his family or to determine where he was from, the police said.

Moran was one of four men clubbed to death as they slept on the sidewalks around Chatham Square on Oct. 5. The police have charged another homeless man, Randy Rodriguez Santos, 24, with the murders.

Identifying the victims proved a challenge, the police and medical examiners said, not just because of their facial injuries, but because they had not been in touch with their families.

It is not uncommon for the police to have trouble discovering the identity of a homeless murder victim because homeless people are often reluctant to share their names with others on the street or the authorities.

Outreach workers said they can spend weeks, even months, trying to persuade someone to give a full name.

For many people living unsheltered, a name may be one of the few possessions they have left, and they guard it the way other people shield social security numbers or ATM codes, advocates for the homeless said.

“Some give me their nickname,” Ramos said.

The city’s medical examiner’s office said that out of a “large volume of cases” an average of 15 people go unidentified per year.

In the end, the police said, it was Moran’s arrests that left a trail for investigators: his fingerprints were on file.

In April 2013, two days after his 33rd birthday, he was arrested on charges of drinking in public while aboard a train.

“I was only drinking a little bit,” he told the police at a subway station in Queens. The case was dismissed, as was a weapons charge from August 2012. Another case for criminal possession of a weapon was sealed.

He once listed his address as a residence on Northern Boulevard in Queens that is the site of an employment office of Goodwill Industries of New York and Northern Jersey. The office offers help with résumés and job coaching to people with developmental disabilities. But there are other commercial tenants in the same building.

The Police Department declined to give details about the steps detectives took to identify Moran’s family members and the man found in the manhole.

Joseph Giacalone, a retired detective sergeant who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said investigators generally rely on a number of methods to connect a person’s living history with a lifeless body.

“The path of least resistance is to go and see if the person has a wallet on them,” he said. A driver’s license or medical insurance card often leads to family members, he said.

“We still need a family member to identify the body,” he said.

But this simple process becomes more challenging when a person had been living on the street, and it becomes doubly hard when the body is in a state of decomposition, he said.

The next logical step is to trace a person’s history through fingerprints, but that is hit and miss, he said.

Investigators also often canvass neighborhoods with photographs and sketches of the deceased to try to find anyone that knew them, he said.

“They hang them in shelters and show them to people on the street, to anyone who might be able to tell us who the person is,” he said.

Investigators and medical examiners also turn to DNA samples from a hair brush or a undergarment and try to match them to DNA samples submitted by family members looking for a missing relative, he said.

Sometimes, they never get an answer. There are more than 1 million people buried in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island, many of them unidentified.

“If the family isn’t looking for them, thousands of people are buried in potter’s field,” Giacalone said. “But we never stop trying to find out who they are.”

This article originally appeared in

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