The border is full of sad stories, but this latest about 12-year-old Noemi Alvarez Quillay could be the saddest in a long, long time. Like many, those who've crossed successfully and those who've died in the desert, she was trying to cross the border to her family during a long trek from Ecuador and then to her death in a Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in a children's shelter.

From the New York Times:

"I went with a coyote and spent two months in Nicaragua and came back from there," she wrote in a school information sheet.

She got a little closer this year. In March, a month after she left home, the police picked up Noemi and a coyote in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The authorities took her to a children's shelter. She was described as crying inconsolably after being questioned by a prosecutor. A few days later, she was found hanged from a shower curtain rod in a bathroom at the shelter. Her death, ruled a suicide by Mexican authorities, remains under investigation by a human rights commission there.