Ten days after teenagers beat Jose Luis Romano, 40, to death and stole his sneakers and $10 from his bloody body in Sunset Park, his corpse lay unidentified in a city morgue. Meanwhile, the family and friends of the illegal immigrant from Mexico grew increasingly desperate to find him.

For days following his disappearance in the early hours of June 14, they searched fruitlessly at hospitals and weathered frustrating encounters with local police who did not speak Spanish. Only on June 25 did the family identify the body, through a local newspaper that reported police were still seeking to identify the Hispanic victim.

Now, with Romano buried in his native village in the state of Puebla, where his wife and three young children live, his loved ones in New York still express profound worry that his case will not be properly prosecuted.

“If the police already knew they had some person that fit the description, I don’t see how they didn’t help me with anything,” the deceased’s cousin, Amalia Romano, 32, said in Spanish. “We got no support from the police, none.”

Three years ago, Ms. Romano followed her cousin’s path to Brooklyn. Like him, she stole across the border to America to support her children, whom she left behind in Mexico.

When she arrived in Brooklyn, she said, she found her cousin working hard to fulfill his promise to his wife and three children back home, to send back enough money to buy them a house. Pressing clothes for a dry cleaner in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, Romano made about $1,000 a month, she said. It was enough to cover his $300 monthly rent, support his children’s education, and purchase land in Mexico.

During their years together in America, where Ms. Romano was his closest relative, she said he had been like a brother to her. When he did not go to work on June 14, she began to fear the worst.

For days, she said, all she knew of her cousin was that he left his apartment around 1 a.m. She still does not know why.

“It was strange because he never went out in the street – always to work and to his house,” a roommate of three years, Francisca Martinez, said. Her sister, Ana Maria Martinez, one of seven people with whom he shared the three-bedroom apartment, said she warned Romano it was dangerous to go out at night. In their neighborhood, she said, Mexican immigrants are frequently targeted by Puerto Rican youth.

He brushed aside her warning. “He said to my sister, ‘If I don’t come back in a short while, I’ll come tomorrow, I’ll spend the night out’ – but he never returned again,” Ana Maria Martinez said.

About an hour after the Martinez sisters said he left the house, a woman ran into a bodega a few blocks away on Fourth Avenue. Outside, between two cars, Romano’s lifeless body lay, the employee who attended to him, Luis Santana, said.

Later that day, two Puerto Rican teenagers, Luis Alvarado, 17, and a 14-year-old turned themselves in at the 72nd Precinct.

The younger one allegedly confessed to stealing the money and shoes from Romano while two other teenagers, Mr. Alvarado and another youth, punched and beat the man’s face and head, according to court documents. The attacks knocked him over and he fatally struck his head against the cement curb, the 14-year-old told police.

At their arraignment, the youths and their families blamed the still unidentified Romano, saying he had been drunk and insulted Puerto Ricans. Mr. Alvarado is awaiting a grand jury decision on charges of second-degree manslaughter. The 14-year-old’s case was turned over to family court, where he faces charges of gang assault in the second degree and two charges of grand larceny in the fourth degree. The third youth has not been charged.

With nothing more on Romano than his black jeans, gray shirt, and black cord with a cross – the undocumented immigrant had no identification papers – the police of the 72nd Precinct could not identify his body. The bodega worker said he had never seen the man before. A police sketch of Romano requesting information on an unidentified Hispanic man was widely distributed, making both English and Spanish print and broadcast reports, including the front page of the newspaper El Diario/La Prensa. Somehow all the notices failed to reach the dead man’s friends and family.

Instead, they took their search to the streets. They called women he occasionally saw, contacted friends, asked at his job, and inquired at neighborhood restaurants and bars, and at hospitals.

Only when those efforts failed did his cousin Amalia Romano seek out help from the police precinct, at the recommendation of hospital workers, on June 21. Bearing pictures of her missing cousin, she said, she was turned away and instructed instead to call 911 to see if he had been arrested.

When that failed to find an answer, the women called 911 again, asking that police investigate the case. Three pairs of officers from the 72nd Precinct went to their house the next day, the women said. Only one pair spoke Spanish, and none of the six made the connection with the unidentified victim, the women insisted. Eventually, officers called and said they found nothing but had made the women an appointment for June 25 at 4 p.m. to see a detective.

A spokeswoman for the New York Police Department, Officer Doris Garcia, insisted that all actions were taken according to police procedure. While the Sunset Park precinct may not always have a Spanish patrol officer available, officers said, language assistance is never far away. A detective at the precinct, Lieutenant Andrew Ferris, said that the family did not approach the police until more than a week after the death, but that detectives then quickly connected the cases.

Still, the roommates said it was chance, not the police, that guided them to Romano’s body. An acquaintance told the younger sister about an article in a newspaper with a sketch of an unidentified Hispanic man who was still missing. After midnight, she searched through the papers until, in the local Home Reporter and Sunset News, she came upon the sketch.

“At this moment my heart started to pound,” Ana Maria Martinez said.

First thing the next morning, the roommates and Ms. Romano went to Lutheran Hospital, where Romano had been declared dead on arrival 11 days before. From there, they were sent back again to the 72nd Precinct. There they were given the address of the morgue. Alone, the women went there and immediately identified the body.

Only then did Amalia Romano break down and call her cousin’s wife in Mexico to convey the dreaded truth: Her husband was dead.

On Sunday, while Romano’s body was transported from New York to Mexico, his Brooklyn room was just as he left it: Dry-cleaned shirts covered in plastic, two MetroCards and change on his bedside table, pictures on the wall of sexy women ripped out of magazines, and a photo of his daughter receiving communion above his bed. The only difference was that candles bearing the image of the Virgin Mary were burning, and carnations were in every corner.