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NJF941102; Woodbridge, NJ Nov 2 1994 Living
Topic Started: Jul 19 2006, 06:03 AM (525 Views)
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Unidentified Living Hispanic Female Located wandering at the Woodbridge Mall, on November 2, 1994 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Estimated 55 - 70 years old by medical's estimation. (Born around 1930). She goes by the name Elba.

Vital Statistics
Subject is approximately as 5'1 and weighed 95 -100 pounds. She has black hair and brown eyes. She has been nicknamed Elba.

Subject was transferred to Ancora State Hospital from Marlboro Hospital on June 24, 1997. In 1994 during one conversation with an employee, the subject stated her name was "Elba Leonor Socarras".

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Investigators
If you have any information concerning this woman's identity, please contact:
New Jersey State Police
609-882-2000
or
Camden County Sheriff's Office, New Jersey
Missing Persons Unit
Sergeant William Fontanez
856-225-5470
All information may be submitted on an anonymous basis.

Source Information:
Ancora State Hospital
Ancora, New Jersey
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Unidentified Hispanic Female Amnesia Victim

Located on November 2, 1994 in Woodbridge, Middlesex County, New Jersey.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vital Statistics


Estimated age: 44 - 54 years old (when found) 55 - 70 years old now
Approximate Height and Weight: 5'2"- 5'4"; 135 - 145 lbs.
Distinguishing Characteristics: Black hair; brown eyes.
Scars / Tattoos: She has a scar on her abdomen.
Clothing: She was wearing what may be a wedding band in addition to another gold ring


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Case History
Amnesia victim was located wandering the Woodbridge Mall on November 2, 1994 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. In 1994, during a conversation, she stated that her name was Elba Leonor Socarras. She is Spanish-speaking and when she was found, she was well groomed and in good health. She is currently suffering from Alzheimer's disease and is unable to give any information that will aid in her identification. She has also mentioned the name of "Alba" and may also be associated to the name of "Altagracia Alvarez".



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Investigators
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:
New Jersey Human Services Police
Officer Eduardo Ojeda
908-537-3144
or
New Jersey State Police
1-800-709-7090
E-Mail

NCIC Number: U-590002324
Agency Number(s): S70011762 and H02595-08
Please refer to this number when contacting any agency with information regarding this case.

Source Information: Camden County Sheriff's Office



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http://www.doenetwork.us/cases/176ufnj.html
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The woman found wandering the Woodbridge Center mall on Nov. 2, 1994, appeared to be in her mid-50s, spoke only Spanish and couldn't remember her name or where she lived. She carried an empty purse with no identification.

What mall security guards and police officers knew about her they divined by her appearance: She wore two rings, including a wed ding band. Her hair was combed and her clothes were clean.

Fourteen years later, authorities still don't know much about her.


"Jane Doe" as she appeared in 1994.
The mystery woman, alternately referred to as "Jane Doe" and "Elba," has lived quietly -- and anonymously -- in New Jersey's psychiatric hospital system.

Sensing time may be running out -- diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she is bedridden at the Garrett Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital in Hunterdon County -- state Human Services officials are launching the biggest effort yet to find out who she is.

"Every human being is entitled to the minimal dignity of dying at least with their name," said Lt. Eduardo Ojeda of the Human Services Police Department. "This lady is a human being. I am sure she has some family member out there or friends who never knew what happened or what became of her. She may be a mother, a sister. She may be someone's grandmother."

Beginning this week, the woman's photos will be circulated to media outlets, particularly the Spanish-speaking press. Ojeda has contacted the consulates for the Colombian and Venezuelan governments and plans to canvass offices of other Central and South America countries.

Most familiar with her case sus pect she came to this country illegally. They believe when she showed signs of amnesia or dementia, a relative or friend may have left her at the mall, assuming someone would come to her aid.

Amy Bellisano, senior general manager at Woodbridge Center, recalls when a security guard found her wandering the sprawling two- story mall.

"It appeared someone had dropped her off. We kept thinking someone would come to find her," Bellisano said. "She spent most of the day in our mall office conference room. She had no idea why she was here ... she looked clean and well cared for."

Walter Dnistran, the mall's maintenance supervisor, asked her questions in Spanish, but she seemed confused, Bellisano said. "Ultimately we had to call the police because we couldn't get any information from her. I remember feeling very sad," she said.

After two weeks at Raritan Bay Medical Center in Perth Amboy, where doctors said she was in good physical health, she was transferred to the public psychiatric hospital system: Marlboro in Mon mouth County until it closed in 1997, Ancora in Camden County until 2002, and now Hagedorn, where she lives among 300 other patients, mostly senior citizens, said hospital CEO Debra A. Smith.

The name plate on her bedroom door says "J. Doe." It's possible her name is Elba because in a rare mo ment 14 years ago, she told a Spanish-speaking aide at Marlboro her name was "Elba Leonor Socarras," Ojeda said. Once, she told a worker she was "Alba." Law enforcement officers said she's uttered a name of a person they suspect she may have known: "Altagracia Alvarez."

She may have lived in Colombia -- or maybe it was Colonia, a sec tion of Woodbridge Township. "She was not too clear. She was found in Woodbridge, which is close to Colonia," said Nathali Ruiz, a social worker at Hagedorn.

The woman stopped talking while at Ancora, hospital workers said. Aside from taking her meals in the nearby dining room, she spends her time in a private room at Hagedorn in Glen Gardner, its windows offering a view, 1,800 feet above sea level, of the lush hills of Spruce Run State Park.

"She's in her own world," said Jean Henderson, a Hagedorn employee who helps look after her.

Occasionally she'll moan or grimace to communicate discom fort, like when she is among other patients for too long. She'll smile "whenever you are giving her care," said Ana Cartegena, another Human Services technician.

When a group of visitors stopped by Thursday, "Elba," wearing a flowered nightgown, was lying in a reclining chair, a teddy bear and a crocheted purple blan ket on the night table next to her. Ojeda gently asked the same questions he does on every visit: "What is your name? Where is your husband?" She met his gaze briefly and squeezed his finger extra hard.

"Maybe she's trying to tell me something," he said. In six years, Ojeda has never reached her.

He said this is the most concerted effort to find her identity.

"In those first few years, the case got passed around from agency to agency," he said. "Perth Amboy police at one time circu lated a poster with her picture on it. When she was at Ancora, the Camden County sheriff put her on the internet, and they still have her picture there."

Ojeda recently enlisted a detective to fingerprint "Elba" -- no easy feat because her arms are stiff and her fingertips wrinkled, he said. They were sent to consulates in Venezuela and Colombia, but there's been no response.

Tony Evelina, a volunteer researcher with the Doe Network, (doenetwork.org), a site for missing and unidentified people, doubts fingerprints will reveal anything.

"I've have been working on this woman's case, and I have a feeling she is illegal," he said. "If she had a green card, immigration would have had (fingerprints) on file."

Because nobody knows whether "Elba" is a U.S. citizen, she does not receive Medicaid and can't be transferred to a nursing home, said Susan Hollander Whitman at the state Office of the Public Guardian for Elderly Adults.

"She doesn't belong in a psychiatric hospital," said Whitman. She said her office represents "quite a few people" in the same predicament. "If we don't have proof of where they are from and their citizenship, they are stuck wherever they are," she said.

Smith said each state psychiatric hospital typically has one or two "Jane Does" or "John Does."

Unidentified people who die at a state institution are buried in a potter's field -- with numbers on their headstones instead of their names.

That troubles Ojeda.

"My hope is we will be able to identify her, while she is still around," he said. "'We're hoping the public will help us."

People with information about "Elba's" identity may contact Lt. Eduardo Ojeda at (609)633-3673 or Eduardo.Ojeda@dhs.state.nj.us Callers may remain anonymous.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/t..._one_knows.html
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Authorities hope to ID 'Jane Doe' found at Woodbridge Center nearly 14 years ago
By KEN SERRANO • STAFF WRITER • September 8, 2008

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Well-dressed, wearing a wedding ring and carrying a pocketbook, the Spanish-speaking woman in her 50s appeared confused when she was found wandering around Woodbridge Center mall.


That was nearly 14 years ago. And the woman, known as Elba, but officially "Jane Doe," is still lost, both from family and friends, and also within a bureaucratic limbo that keeps her confined in Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital in Lebanon Township.

There have been efforts over the years to try to find someone who knows the woman, now suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease. But no solid leads have emerged.

In a rare moment of lucidity while at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in 2001, she told an employee there that her name was Elba Leonor Socarras.

"She hasn't said a word since," said Lt. Eduardo Ojeda of the state Human Services Police. Ojeda has handled the case since 2002 and is once again putting the word out to seek family members.

The case has tested Ojeda. He has taken fingerprints of the woman and taken them to the consulates of Venezuala and Colombia, hoping that would turn up relatives. But, like the clue about her name, those efforts have yielded nothing so far.

Ojeda plans to continue to the embassies of other Latin and South American countries.

Ojeda and others suspect that the woman was an illegal immigrant. Had she been here legally, federal authorities would have had her fingerprints on file, Ojeda said.

Having no legal status complicates her care, he said. Because she has no proof of legal residency, Medicaid will not pay for her care in a nursing home. So she remains at Hagedorn instead of somewhere more appropriate.

"She doesn't have a psychiatric problem, she has a geriatric problem," Ojeda said.

Amy Bellisano, senior general manager at Woodbridge Center mall, recalled the woman who spent most of the day in the mall's conference room when she was found in November 1994.

"We do a lot to reconnect family and friends who have become separated," Bellisano said. "This is the only time we weren't able to reconnect someone."

The woman appeared well-dressed and well cared-for, Bellisano said. But there was no trace of her background. A Spanish-speaking employee questioned the woman, but got nowhere.

"She didn't know who she was or where she was from," Bellisano said. "There was no information on her to be able to make phone calls."

She was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds when found. Police at the time believed her to be in her mid-50s. Her hair was beginning to turn gray.

The Woodbridge police took her to Raritan Bay Medical Center, Perth Amboy Division, where she remained until the state placed her in Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, which closed a decade ago.

Ojeda believes someone dropped her off at Woodbridge Center mall and left her so the state would care for the woman.

She has deteriorated over the years, said Ojeda, who visits her and speaks to her in Spanish. She is now bedridden and does little.

"'She is no trouble," he said. "She doesn't bother a fly. She's kind of oblivious to what's going on around her."

Although she is not in poor physical health, her eventual demise is also serving as impetus for Ojeda to find out who she is. Nameless people who die while under the care of the state suffer the final indignity of being buried in a potter's field, with a number for a grave marker instead of a name.

"She's got to have family somewhere in some country," he said. "Maybe she's somebody's wife, somebody's mother, somebody's grandmother."

Ojeda is urging anyone with information on the woman to call him at 609-633-3673.

Ken Serrano: kserrano@mycentraljersey.com
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October 21, 2008
For a Jane Doe, Seeking an Identity and Immigration Status
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
GLEN GARDNER, N.J. — One person was positive the woman was the well-dressed bag lady who used to frequent a Pathmark supermarket near the Woodbridge Center mall. Another remembered serving her cheeseburgers at the local Burger King.

Nydia Nieves, a 41-year-old laundress from Reading, Pa., was sure it was someone she knew, too — an Ecuadorean immigrant named Jenny Peña, whose disabled son lives on Staten Island. Ms. Nieves drove 70 miles to visit the woman here at Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital, where the sign on the woman’s door says simply J. Doe, and held her hand.

“Inside of me, I feel that it’s her,” Ms. Nieves said afterward.

After 14 years of languishing in anonymity, of not belonging to anybody, the woman may soon be reclaimed, discovered, identified. The calls have been pouring in since the New Jersey Human Services Department circulated her photograph to the news media last month, and Lt. Eduardo Ojeda, who works for the department and is leading the hunt, said he is certain that “somewhere in there there’s going to be a bingo.”

The newly intensified search is driven not just by compassion, but by financial pressure. The Hagedorn Jane Doe — a petite woman in her 60s or 70s, with dementia so advanced she no longer walks or talks — is one of an untold number of anonymous older people in state custody across the country whose long-term care is confounded by federal Medicaid policy concerning immigrants.

The New Jersey public guardian’s office wants to move the woman to a nursing home, which would cost about a third as much as her $670-per-day care at Hagedorn, and would be covered by Medicaid, cutting the costs for state taxpayers. The state will not move her without Medicaid, state officials said.

But since 2006, federal regulations have required that Medicaid recipients provide proof of citizenship or legal residency to receive long-term coverage, and some illegal immigrants in grave conditions have been returned to their homelands, not by the government but by hospitals (Debra A. Smith, Hagedorn’s chief executive, said the hospital would not do that). Social workers suspect that some of the unidentified hospital patients may be undocumented immigrants abandoned by relatives desperate to get them needed care.

“There’s this layer of fog that lays over this area of people who become elderly and incapacitated who are not citizens, or who become incapacitated without ID, and then they’re stuck in nether land,” said Edward H. Tetelman, New Jersey’s acting public guardian.

Others lose their forms of identification to the hardships of life on the street, said Susan Hollander Whitman, a state social worker who counts the Hagedorn Jane Doe among her clients. “It’s not the kind of thing a transient person is going to keep on them or keep anywhere,” Ms. Whitman explained. “You have to go back to square one to try to figure out where they came from — what state, what country, whatever, and try to get all the documents that you need in order to get the Medicaid.”

The Hagedorn Jane Doe once told a nurse that her name was Elba Leonor Socarras, and that she was from either Colombia, the country, or Colonia, a section of Woodbridge, N.J., near the mall where she was found wandering on Nov. 2, 1994. Clean and well dressed, she wore a wedding band without an inscription and carried an empty purse — as if, Lieutenant Ojeda said, she had been purposely stripped of clues. There were no relevant missing persons reports filed, furthering suspicion.

“It was all too contrived,” Lieutenant Ojeda said. “Too pat.”

The lieutenant has been investigating the woman’s background on and off since 2002, when she arrived at Hagedorn, where he was then stationed. She is of little help, sitting like a statue in her geri-chair, a kind of Barcalounger on wheels, arms glued to her chest. Her fingers are crablike, her gaze usually fixed to the left. She likes to eat, and sometimes screams to be fed.

On a recent visit, Lieutenant Ojeda rubbed her hand and leaned in close.

“Como estas Elba?” he asked in Spanish, the only language she has been heard to speak since she entered state custody. “Te recuerdas de Rosalina, la Cubana?” After a pause, he asked, “Eres Colombiana?” Jane Doe remained frozen, a grimace on her face.

Hagedorn has two other unidentified people among its 300 patients, an African-American man and another Hispanic woman. In similar cases, the mystery is often never solved.

Lieutenant Ojeda remembers a patient who called himself Dorian Gray, but unlike the Oscar Wilde character, he grew old and died. Mr. Tetelman, the public guardian, recalled a woman known only as Mrs. Brown who was hospitalized in Atlantic City after her bus broke down on the way to New York from Baltimore. In another case, he said, a Korean family who owned a fish store in Camden, N.J., took in a stranger because she seemed Korean. When she became ill and had to go to the hospital, no one knew her name.

“You’d think somebody would say, ‘Where’s Mom, where’s my sister, what happened to them?’ ” Mr. Tetelman said. “But nobody comes forward.”

When the Hagedorn Jane Doe was found wandering the mall, she could talk in Spanish, but was disoriented and amnesiac, unsure even of her name. She spent two weeks under evaluation at the Perth Amboy division of Raritan Bay Medical Center, before being transferred to Marlboro State Psychiatric Hospital, where she stayed until it closed in 1997. Then she spent five years at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital, in southern New Jersey, before landing at Hagedorn, on the state’s western edge, 20 miles east of Easton, Pa.

It is a hospital that could have been dreamed up by the neurologist-author Oliver Sacks, nestled on a wooded campus where deer roam freely, presided over by a Victorian-looking white administration building that features a grand lobby with a circular staircase, iron chandelier and lace curtains.

Lieutenant Ojeda, who is of Puerto Rican descent, got promoted and left Hagedorn in 2005, but still visits Jane Doe once or twice a year, always asking the same questions in Spanish: “Who are you? Are you married? Do you have any children?” Sometimes she squeezes his hand, but he suspects this is reflexive.

“I’m a cop who also has a mother,” he said. “She is 86. I’m an only child. I would turn over heaven and earth if she disappeared on me.”

He worries that Jane Doe could end up in a potter’s field where the graves bear numbers instead of names. “Every human being is entitled to at least the minimal dignity to die under their own name,” he said. “This lady has to have somebody somewhere, to be somebody’s grandmother, somebody’s wife. Somebody has to know something.”

Typically, detectives hunt for missing persons, holding the hands of relatives desperate to find lost loved ones. But Lieutenant Ojeda is searching for a person who is missing her essence, and for a family that may not want to be found.

Before he became involved, Lieutenant Ojeda said, the State Police contacted people with the surname Socarras, the name she had given, but none claimed her. In June, based on a hunch that she looked Hispanic but not Caribbean, he took new fingerprints — he had to use spoons from a forensic kit because her fingers could not be straightened out — and took them to the Colombian and Venezuelan consulates, hoping they might match a national identity card. He has not heard back.

The State Police, the Camden County Sheriff’s office and the Doe Network, an organization that examines cases of the missing and unidentified, have all listed her as an unidentified person. Her information has been sent to the National Crime Information Center database, which tracks missing persons. Her fingerprints were run through the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System. No matches anywhere.

A few months ago, at a recommitment hearing to review Jane Doe’s status, the hearing officer wondered what had been done lately to identify her. Prompted by that question, the Human Services Department announced on Sept. 8 that the authorities were “again seeking the public’s help” in identifying Jane Doe, and provided Lieutenant Ojeda’s telephone number (609-633-3673).

The calls started rolling in, as many as 18 a day. They were from people like Monica Corrigan, a nurse who had fed and bathed the woman at Marlboro, and thought Jane Doe might have once worked as a cleaning lady because “she was always tidying up.”

“If she grabbed a towel, she tried to fold it,” Miss Corrigan recalled. “We called her Elba, because that’s all she ever said — ‘Elba, Elba.’ ” Miss Corrigan, whose father had Alzheimer’s disease, was startled to see how old the woman looked in a recent photograph; she remembered her as childlike, holding a staff member’s hand or shirt as she walked.

The most concrete lead has come from Ms. Nieves, who saw Jane Doe’s picture on the Internet. Ms. Nieves and her pastor traveled to Hagedorn and showed her a photograph of a young, vibrant Jenny Peña nestled against her little boy, taken many years ago, when Ms. Nieves and Ms. Peña were neighbors in East Harlem.

“Her eyes lit up when she saw the child,” said Keila Zapata, a social work supervisor who witnessed the visit. “We left her the picture so that she could have it in her room.” The likeness is striking, despite Jane Doe’s ravaged condition; perhaps, Ms. Zapata said, DNA tests on the woman and the boy, who is now in his 30s, are in order.

But Lieutenant Ojeda has been most intrigued by several callers from New York City who sounded about Jane Doe’s age and said they recognized her immediately. They said they had gone to church with the woman, and that she had come to the United States illegally, perhaps from Colombia. They said she had fallen on hard times and had been evicted from her apartment. She had a daughter, not a son.

These clues dovetail with a story that Jane Doe’s caretakers tell of the day she was found at the Woodbridge mall. She was not alone but with a younger woman, who took her up to a security guard and said something like, “This woman’s following me,” then left.

Angelica Medaglia contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/nyregion...ion&oref=slogin
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A woman from East Harlem believes that Jane Doe may be a former neighbor, Jenny Peña, above with her son, right.
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For a Jane Doe, Seeking an Identity and Immigration Status
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By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: October 20, 2008
GLEN GARDNER, N.J. — One person was positive the woman was the well-dressed bag lady who used to frequent a Pathmark supermarket near the Woodbridge Center mall. Another remembered serving her cheeseburgers at the local Burger King.

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James Estrin/The New York Times
Since November 1994, when she was found wandering a New Jersey mall, a woman’s identity has been a mystery. But Lt. Eduardo Ojeda, shown visiting the woman, hopes an answer is near.


A woman from East Harlem believes that Jane Doe may be a former neighbor, Jenny Peña, above with her son, right.
Nydia Nieves, a 41-year-old laundress from Reading, Pa., was sure it was someone she knew, too — an Ecuadorean immigrant named Jenny Peña, whose disabled son lives on Staten Island. Ms. Nieves drove 70 miles to visit the woman here at Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital, where the sign on the woman’s door says simply J. Doe, and held her hand.

“Inside of me, I feel that it’s her,” Ms. Nieves said afterward.

After 14 years of languishing in anonymity, of not belonging to anybody, the woman may soon be reclaimed, discovered, identified. The calls have been pouring in since the New Jersey Human Services Department circulated her photograph to the news media last month, and Lt. Eduardo Ojeda, who works for the department and is leading the hunt, said he is certain that “somewhere in there there’s going to be a bingo.”

The newly intensified search is driven not just by compassion, but by financial pressure. The Hagedorn Jane Doe — a petite woman in her 60s or 70s, with dementia so advanced she no longer walks or talks — is one of an untold number of anonymous older people in state custody across the country whose long-term care is confounded by federal Medicaid policy concerning immigrants.

The New Jersey public guardian’s office wants to move the woman to a nursing home, which would cost about a third as much as her $670-per-day care at Hagedorn, and would be covered by Medicaid, cutting the costs for state taxpayers. The state will not move her without Medicaid, state officials said.

But since 2006, federal regulations have required that Medicaid recipients provide proof of citizenship or legal residency to receive long-term coverage, and some illegal immigrants in grave conditions have been returned to their homelands, not by the government but by hospitals (Debra A. Smith, Hagedorn’s chief executive, said the hospital would not do that). Social workers suspect that some of the unidentified hospital patients may be undocumented immigrants abandoned by relatives desperate to get them needed care.

“There’s this layer of fog that lays over this area of people who become elderly and incapacitated who are not citizens, or who become incapacitated without ID, and then they’re stuck in nether land,” said Edward H. Tetelman, New Jersey’s acting public guardian.

Others lose their forms of identification to the hardships of life on the street, said Susan Hollander Whitman, a state social worker who counts the Hagedorn Jane Doe among her clients. “It’s not the kind of thing a transient person is going to keep on them or keep anywhere,” Ms. Whitman explained. “You have to go back to square one to try to figure out where they came from — what state, what country, whatever, and try to get all the documents that you need in order to get the Medicaid.”

The Hagedorn Jane Doe once told a nurse that her name was Elba Leonor Socarras, and that she was from either Colombia, the country, or Colonia, a section of Woodbridge, N.J., near the mall where she was found wandering on Nov. 2, 1994. Clean and well dressed, she wore a wedding band without an inscription and carried an empty purse — as if, Lieutenant Ojeda said, she had been purposely stripped of clues. There were no relevant missing persons reports filed, furthering suspicion.

“It was all too contrived,” Lieutenant Ojeda said. “Too pat.”

The lieutenant has been investigating the woman’s background on and off since 2002, when she arrived at Hagedorn, where he was then stationed. She is of little help, sitting like a statue in her geri-chair, a kind of Barcalounger on wheels, arms glued to her chest. Her fingers are crablike, her gaze usually fixed to the left. She likes to eat, and sometimes screams to be fed.

On a recent visit, Lieutenant Ojeda rubbed her hand and leaned in close.

“Como estas Elba?” he asked in Spanish, the only language she has been heard to speak since she entered state custody. “Te recuerdas de Rosalina, la Cubana?” After a pause, he asked, “Eres Colombiana?” Jane Doe remained frozen, a grimace on her face.

Hagedorn has two other unidentified people among its 300 patients, an African-American man and another Hispanic woman. In similar cases, the mystery is often never solved.

Lieutenant Ojeda remembers a patient who called himself Dorian Gray, but unlike the Oscar Wilde character, he grew old and died. Mr. Tetelman, the public guardian, recalled a woman known only as Mrs. Brown who was hospitalized in Atlantic City after her bus broke down on the way to New York from Baltimore. In another case, he said, a Korean family who owned a fish store in Camden, N.J., took in a stranger because she seemed Korean. When she became ill and had to go to the hospital, no one knew her name.

“You’d think somebody would say, ‘Where’s Mom, where’s my sister, what happened to them?’ ” Mr. Tetelman said. “But nobody comes forward.”

When the Hagedorn Jane Doe was found wandering the mall, she could talk in Spanish, but was disoriented and amnesiac, unsure even of her name. She spent two weeks under evaluation at the Perth Amboy division of Raritan Bay Medical Center, before being transferred to Marlboro State Psychiatric Hospital, where she stayed until it closed in 1997. Then she spent five years at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital, in southern New Jersey, before landing at Hagedorn, on the state’s western edge, 20 miles east of Easton, Pa.

It is a hospital that could have been dreamed up by the neurologist-author Oliver Sacks, nestled on a wooded campus where deer roam freely, presided over by a Victorian-looking white administration building that features a grand lobby with a circular staircase, iron chandelier and lace curtains.

Lieutenant Ojeda, who is of Puerto Rican descent, got promoted and left Hagedorn in 2005, but still visits Jane Doe once or twice a year, always asking the same questions in Spanish: “Who are you? Are you married? Do you have any children?” Sometimes she squeezes his hand, but he suspects this is reflexive.

“I’m a cop who also has a mother,” he said. “She is 86. I’m an only child. I would turn over heaven and earth if she disappeared on me.”

He worries that Jane Doe could end up in a potter’s field where the graves bear numbers instead of names. “Every human being is entitled to at least the minimal dignity to die under their own name,” he said. “This lady has to have somebody somewhere, to be somebody’s grandmother, somebody’s wife. Somebody has to know something.”

Typically, detectives hunt for missing persons, holding the hands of relatives desperate to find lost loved ones. But Lieutenant Ojeda is searching for a person who is missing her essence, and for a family that may not want to be found.

Before he became involved, Lieutenant Ojeda said, the State Police contacted people with the surname Socarras, the name she had given, but none claimed her. In June, based on a hunch that she looked Hispanic but not Caribbean, he took new fingerprints — he had to use spoons from a forensic kit because her fingers could not be straightened out — and took them to the Colombian and Venezuelan consulates, hoping they might match a national identity card. He has not heard back.

The State Police, the Camden County Sheriff’s office and the Doe Network, an organization that examines cases of the missing and unidentified, have all listed her as an unidentified person. Her information has been sent to the National Crime Information Center database, which tracks missing persons. Her fingerprints were run through the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System. No matches anywhere.

A few months ago, at a recommitment hearing to review Jane Doe’s status, the hearing officer wondered what had been done lately to identify her. Prompted by that question, the Human Services Department announced on Sept. 8 that the authorities were “again seeking the public’s help” in identifying Jane Doe, and provided Lieutenant Ojeda’s telephone number (609-633-3673).

The calls started rolling in, as many as 18 a day. They were from people like Monica Corrigan, a nurse who had fed and bathed the woman at Marlboro, and thought Jane Doe might have once worked as a cleaning lady because “she was always tidying up.”

“If she grabbed a towel, she tried to fold it,” Miss Corrigan recalled. “We called her Elba, because that’s all she ever said — ‘Elba, Elba.’ ” Miss Corrigan, whose father had Alzheimer’s disease, was startled to see how old the woman looked in a recent photograph; she remembered her as childlike, holding a staff member’s hand or shirt as she walked.

The most concrete lead has come from Ms. Nieves, who saw Jane Doe’s picture on the Internet. Ms. Nieves and her pastor traveled to Hagedorn and showed her a photograph of a young, vibrant Jenny Peña nestled against her little boy, taken many years ago, when Ms. Nieves and Ms. Peña were neighbors in East Harlem.

“Her eyes lit up when she saw the child,” said Keila Zapata, a social work supervisor who witnessed the visit. “We left her the picture so that she could have it in her room.” The likeness is striking, despite Jane Doe’s ravaged condition; perhaps, Ms. Zapata said, DNA tests on the woman and the boy, who is now in his 30s, are in order.

But Lieutenant Ojeda has been most intrigued by several callers from New York City who sounded about Jane Doe’s age and said they recognized her immediately. They said they had gone to church with the woman, and that she had come to the United States illegally, perhaps from Colombia. They said she had fallen on hard times and had been evicted from her apartment. She had a daughter, not a son.

These clues dovetail with a story that Jane Doe’s caretakers tell of the day she was found at the Woodbridge mall. She was not alone but with a younger woman, who took her up to a security guard and said something like, “This woman’s following me,” then left.

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PorchlightUSA
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PorchlightUSA
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Could she be Jenny Pena?
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tatertot
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http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2008/09...this_woman.html

Do you know this woman?
by The Jersey Journal
Sunday September 07, 2008, 8:25 AM

This woman, unidentified and living in a psychiatric hospital after being found wandering in the Woodbridge Mall in 1994, is dying. Officials are launching an all-out campaign to find out who she is so she can have the dignity of doing so with her name.

The woman, alternately called Jane Doe and Elba at the hospital, only spoke Spanish and was wearing a wedding band and another ring when found, according to a heart-wrenching story in today's Star-Ledger.

Anyone with information about "Elba's" identity may contact Lt. Eduardo Ojeda at (609) 633-3673 or Eduardo.Ojeda@dhs.state.nj.us Callers may remain anonymous.
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tatertot
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Details are scarce, but what wonderful news! It seems her name really was Elba?

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/identified10.html

Elba S.
This amnesia victim was located wandering the Woodbridge Mall in Woodbridge, New Jersey on November 2, 1994. She was identified in February 2009 with the assistance of the Colombian Consulate in New York, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, several informants who responded to media coverage, and a family member who was located in February 2009.
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