La Zona Norte could never be confused with the tourist section. Today, the alley where Artis was found still seems like the end of the world. A group of homeless people sift through the dirt, shoving a shopping cart laden with rags past a broken-down van. One man hobbles up on crutches, an unlit cigarette bobbing in his lips. "What you need, amigo?" he asks.

Artis was found dead in this alley in Tijuana's Zona Norte.

To end up there in the middle of the night, one would have to desert the balloon-festooned restaurants and clubs of Avenida Revolucion, head past the Hard Rock Cafe Tijuana (the exclamation point at the end of the strip), and walk at length past a desolate stretch of buildings. Blocks past that, where some structures sit vacant and vandalized, is the street connecting Calle Coahuilla with the intersection of Calle Baja California and Avenida Revolucion. It is a place nearly anyone would avoid, especially at three in the morning when Artis was found.

When Thomas received word that his brother was dead, he called Artis' mother in Norfolk, and Rose Arrington called her sister, Teena Martin-Smith, in Los Angeles for help. "This is just a mistake," Martin-Smith remembers thinking. "It's Tijuana, things happen. Somebody must have robbed him and they found his ID on that person when they died." Arrington was so distraught that she checked herself into the hospital later that night.

Martin-Smith traveled to Tijuana to view the body. Artis' face was badly cut, and his jaws and nose broken. One eye was sunken into his skull. His ribs were broken, and one lung was punctured. "When he pulled that sheet back, I just lost it," Martin-Smith said. "'My God, who could do this to somebody's child?' I thought." His legs were uninjured.

"He had some scratches on his leg but it wasn't deep or anything," recalls embalmer Jose Martinez of Funeraria del Carmen, the funeral home where Artis' body was later taken. "Usually people that have been hit by a car have fractures, and he didn't have any. I think he was beaten and dumped outside of a car."

Teena Martin-Smith, Artis' aunt, who spearheaded the push for an investigation, viewed his body at the funeral home.

This dovetailed with what Martin-Smith had heard from the coroner — that a car accident was an unlikely cause of death — and shifted the focus to Justin's late-night sighting of Artis in police custody. So Martin-Smith, who ran a staffing agency out of Los Angeles, began a long campaign to explain her nephew's death.

The bureaucracy of a murder investigation

If an American in Tijuana gets killed, kidnapped, arrested or assaulted, Al Anzaldua, the American Citizen Services chief, is one of the first to hear about it. From a hillside office overlooking the city, Anzaldua and his team try to help Americans navigate Tijuana, and help the local government handle Americans. Most of the time, says Anzaldua, that means helping them deal with trouble.

"Tijuana is a place where Americans think they can do things they can't get away with in the United States," says the official. "But they get in trouble. You have the right to walk around at 3 a.m. with money hanging out of your pockets, but that doesn't mean it's smart."

According to Anzaldua, his office processes five American arrests per day — most for minor infractions such as urination or damage to public property. But it's also Anzaldua's job to investigate suspicious deaths and kidnappings. He drops a stack of file folders onto his desk to punctuate his point: all are alleged incidents of police corruption. One woman was bruised by officers; a man says they fleeced him of $300, and so on. Most of the claims dissolve for one reason or another, Anzaldua explains. But every so often, says the official, "you'll think, well wait a minute, what is going on here?"

Artis' case raised such eyebrows in 1998. Responding to Arrington's request for assistance, Anzaldua's predecessor, Lisa Gamble-Barker, stewarded the case through local channels before moving on to another office in 2001.

In any sort of foul-play allegation, ACS brings the problem to the attention of the appropriate Mexican authority. "We'll take it as high as we need to go," says Anzaldua. "But we have to depend on the Mexicans," he said. "We have no jurisdiction."