Perhaps he is a fugitive. And thus his identity remains unknown, as none of his family or friends wants to expose to law enforcement the name of the man who, on December 25, 2005, was hit by a car near the Strip, and has since lain incommunicative and incoherent at Sunrise Hospital. His vitals do little to distinguish him. About 45 years of age, 5 feet 9 inches tall and 135 to 140 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes and no definitive characteristic—no tattoo, birthmark or abnormality—he is quite an indistinct man.
Perhaps he is a homeless individual, one of the thousands in the Las Vegas Valley, just as the police handling his case first suspected. Which, if true, would explain why he was not basking in the warm holiday splendor of his home at 5:40 a.m. on Christmas day, but was instead walking down Flamingo Road, just east of Harmon Lane, accompanied only by his misfortune. But he did not have on traditional homeless attire. His clothes were neat and clean. Or they had been, anyhow, right before he darted out into traffic—which rests for nothing on that street; not even holidays—and was struck by an oncoming car that left him with traumatic injuries and drenched in blood.
At the time of the accident, authorities baptized him with the name John Doe, because he had nothing on him that offered any clue to his identity. No wallet, no ID, no nothing. Only those bloodstained clothes that the doctors at Sunrise Hospital would cut off of his back while treating him, a trauma patient with facial fractures so severe that they would render his speech unintelligible, even weeks after the collision.
"This guy is still a John [Doe], and that is extremely rare," says William Redfairn, the Metro detective in charge of the case. "We handle a lot of cases that start out as a Jane or John, but it is very infrequent that their fingerprints don't reveal who they are, or that nobody comes forth and identifies them."
Perhaps he is an illegal immigrant.
That, at least, is what authorities speculate. For good reason: He has the fertile brown skin of an Hispanic, he seems to respond only to Spanish, and Metro has often found that victims of crimes or accidents who fail to identify themselves are of illegal-immigrant status, worried more about deportation than their injuries. Yes, perhaps he, like the thousands of men who have made the solitary and unauthorized journey from Latin America to Clark County in search of a better livelihood, has no family or friends in this new land to claim him; or if he does, they, perhaps also undocumented, are scared to expose themselves to authorities. And that in truth is a shame, because Metro has stated time and again that it couldn't care less about anyone's immigration status. Its sole interest is to reconnect this suffering man with his people.
Or perhaps he was a lonesome tourist.
For he was just a short morning stroll from the Strip, where more than 2 million visitors come every December, and it is quite plausible that he could have forgotten a rule by which Detective Redfairn wishes everyone in the city would abide: "Always—always!—carry some form of ID on you."
And then again, perhaps he is one of Las Vegas' many luckless men, having lost everything—his house, his possessions, his friends, even his family—to the vices of this insatiable town.
Or perhaps he is just a gypsy without a clan, passing through the gut of Southern Nevada, with its composition as vast and diverse as a rainforest, its population transient and anonymous.
On account of the nature of Las Vegas, says Glenda McCartney, spokesperson for Sunrise Hospital, where the unidentified man has remained bedridden in the ICU for more than a month, Sunrise receives four or five patients a year whose identities go undetermined. At University Medical Center, it is the same: While several mysterious patients are given the name John or Jane Doe upon first receiving treatment, there are a handful who are never demystified during their stay.
McCartney says that doctors will continue to treat him back to complete health, and case workers from social services will continue to work on his behalf—searching the city, the state, the country and even the world for something to manifest his identity, and someone with whom the hospital can send him home.
Their worst fear is that he will end up like a patient Redfairn recalls from a few years past; a woman, also incapacitated by an accident, who without documents of any kind or associates to identify her, remained Jane Doe until the day she was released from the hospital and into the hands of a care home, where she became an adoptee of the state.
Nevertheless, Redfairn says he maintains hope for resolving this case. Even though it could require great patience, given that the unidentified man might not retrieve his lucidity for another week—or month—or year even.
But the medical prognosis looks good, he says, and doctors expect him to eventually recover. Plus, ever since the man's face appeared on local news broadcasts, two people, a nurse and a hotel security guard, have called in with potential names for the man. (But both are so popular that computer searches retrieve too many results to even begin the process of elimination.)
To someone he could be Dad, or brother, or boss; to someone else he could be a friend, a lover, or even a savior of sorts.
"We just don't have a shred of evidence to work with," says McCartney. "So he could very well be anyone."
The only thing for sure is, he is somebody. And he belongs to somebody.