Ethnic/racial misidentification in death: a problem which may distort suicide statistics.

Since the majority of suicide studies are ex post facto studies of demographic data collected by pathologists anc coroner's investigators, the role of the forensic scientist in determining the accuracy of statistical analyses of death is extremely important. This paper discusses how two salient features of a decedent, surname and residence location, can be misleading in determining the ethnic/racial classification of the decreased. Because many Southern California Indians have Spanish Surnames and most do not reside on an Indian reservation it is shown that the suicide statistics may represent an over-estimation of actual Mexican-American suicidal deaths while simultaneously representing an under-estimation of the suicides among American Indians of the region.