Tempe Girl

"THE POIGNANT, AT TIMES BRUTAL ACCOUNT OF ONE GIRL'S SHORT, TRAGIC LIFE." "DEVASTATING....UNSETTLING." In April of 2002, the body of a sixteen-year-old Mexican girl was found behind a strip mall in Tempe, Arizona by a store worker. To this day, she has never been identified. The last person to see her alive told the police she had been kicked out of her mother's house for using drugs. Upon completing an autopsy, the Maricopa County Coroner's Office stated that the girl died of cocaine intoxication. A forensic artist developed a rendition of what the girl might have looked like in life, smiling, hair neatly brushed, as if she was posing for her high school yearbook photo. When the police fail to turn up a name, the media dubs her 'Tempe Girl' and for several months, she is the talk of the Tempe community. But soon, the public's attention turns elsewhere and Tempe Girl fades into obscurity. In Tempe Girl, Koppisch presents the reader with one of many possible accounts of what might have been Tempe Girl's short life. As an object lesson, he rips a story from the tabloids and bludgeons us with a metaphor for humanity in general to challenge our notion of the cheap and inconsequential nature of modern human existence as he traces the journey of an immigrant girl from a poor barrio in Mexico to her untimely death sixteen years later in Arizona.