DENVER — For one man in Denver, Christmas Day was spent alone, outside, in the cold, taking his last breath.
Clyde James Valdez, 61, was found dead on Dec. 25, 2024 near Federal Boulevard and W. 24th Avenue. But months would pass before his family ever knew what happened.
"I was upset. I was hurt," said Patricia Moreno, Valdez's younger sister.
Moreno said she was not notified about her brother's death until the morning of Feb. 15, 2025 — more than 50 days later. And by that point, her brother had already been cremated.
"I was angry that my brother had been sitting at the (Denver Medical Examiner's) office for almost two months, and we were never notified," Moreno said.
The grieving sister later called Denver7 Investigates searching for accountability.
Now, Denver's Office of the Medical Examiner (OME) is admitting that it fell short in its efforts to notify Valdez's next of kin and officials say they are taking steps to make sure it does not happen again.
According to neighbors in Denver's Jefferson Park neighborhood, Valdez was homeless and stayed in the area for some time.
"I would call him a neighbor for the past several years," said Kirsten Galvin, who refers to Valdez as "Jim" and lives a couple of blocks away from where his body was found.
The two spent a lot of time together, and the proof is frozen in pictures of them together.
"We would just hang out all the time, like in the neighborhood. I'd just sit on the sidewalk," Galvin said.
Valdez's sister explained that, later in life, her brother struggled mentally following the death of his mother, his son's mother and his son.
"He just could not function, and he just start living life, unfortunately, on the street," Moreno said.
Valdez suffered from schizophrenia, she explained.
She remembers that before he passed, he expressed concerns about dying and no one claiming him.
"I think, when I found out that he had passed, it kind of dawned on me that he might have known that he was sicker than I knew," she said.
According to his autopsy report, Valdez died from complications of a combination of a type of pneumonia and methamphetamine. The OME ruled his death as an accident.
The office admitted that its employees made mistakes, with the chief administrator telling Denver7 that "there was two distinct missteps."
The first misstep: Failing to check all available databases for Valdez's possible next of kin.
"DMV records are a typical search for our office and in this case, that was the one record that wasn't double-checked," said Meghan Clark, chief of administration for the OME.
An investigator who was working to enter Valdez's information into the national database for missing and unidentified people realized the DMV records were never checked, so the investigator reviewed them, Clark said.
Moreno, his sister, was listed as an emergency contact.
"It seems to me that you need to exhaust every single resource," said Moreno, when recounting what happened.
The second misstep: Incorrectly informing Moreno that Valdez was still in the OME custody. In reality, he had already been cremated.
"Unfortunately, the person who notified her had not reviewed our case file thoroughly enough and made the mistake of telling her that he was still in our care," Clark said. "That information was corrected about an hour later. However, that doesn't change that that original notification was incorrect."
Moreno said Valdez was raised Catholic and would not have wanted to be cremated.
"You took away our opportunity as a family to give him a proper sendoff," she said.
Since the incident, the OME said it is making changes to ensure the same mistakes do not happen again.
According to emails Denver7 Investigates obtained through an open records request, staff members were notified about implementing "The Clyde James Valdez NOK Search Checklist."
The checklist includes a list of databases required to search for each case.
"If a mistake is made, if a step is overlooked, then it is our responsibility to address it, to put something in place to make sure that that doesn't happen again and to take accountability for it, which is what was done in this case," Clark said.
Resources
Denver's OME is constantly updating both the "Unidentified" and "Unclaimed" Persons pages on the office's website.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) is a nationwide resource for missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases.
According to the website, Colorado currently has 390 open missing person cases, 85 open unidentified person cases and 221 unclaimed person cases.
To use NamUs, click on the "Dashboards" tab to search open cases.
