Room 20 is the story of an unidentified man who lay unconscious in a San Diego nursing home for 15 years, kept alive by tubes and machines. When investigative reporter Joanne Faryon first saw him, the sign above his bed identified him only as Sixty-Six Garage. Faryon learned about Garage in 2014, when she was working on a series about life support units pejoratively known as “vent farms.” The nursing home believed he was an undocumented migrant involved in a crash while trying to cross the southern border, but knew little else. Faryon was also told that Garage was in a vegetative state. Faryon persuaded the nursing home to let her report on Garage, in the hope that someone might come forward with information about his identity. She got some leads, but no definitive answers.
One day, early in 2015, Faryon was standing over Garage to see whether he looked like another man in a photo — someone who’d gone missing — when Garage smiled at her. Despite all the research she’d done into consciousness, knowing that a smile can be a reflex, she was convinced in that moment that the nursing home was wrong — that Garage was still in there. In 2015, Faryon quit her job to search full time for Garage’s identity and for details about his accident. And to figure out whether that smile was really a smile.
Faryon worked alone for the next two years, tracking down the people, documents and scientific evidence she needed to understand how an ordinary Mexican teenager ended up trapped in a system that didn’t care enough to learn his name. When the bulk of the reporting was done, she asked Susan White to be her editor and they eventually sold the project to the L.A. Times Studios. The Room 20 podcast was released almost four years after Faryon left her job.
Faryon’s investigation was rooted in old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. As she reported on the accident, she also spent hours at Garage’s bedside. She brought baby toys and helped him learn to use them. She brought a radio because she believed he responded to music. The story took a new twist when 22-year-old Omar Salgado showed up in the next bed, looking more like a corpse than a man. He was believed to be in a vegetative state. But one day, as Faryon looked up from her laptop, she saw Salgado turn his head toward Garage’s radio. In a Helen Keller-like moment she discovered that Salgado could say “yes” or “no” by blinking.
Convinced that Salgado and Garage were both aware and at least somewhat responsive, Faryon expanded her reporting to include the misdiagnosis of consciousness. She traveled to Canada to meet with neuroscientist Adrian Owen, whose studies have found that nearly one in five people diagnosed in a vegetative state are fully conscious. Owen referred Faryon to two UCLA neuroscientists, including Caroline Schnakers, a world expert at diagnosing consciousness. She agreed to test Garage. Room 20 became a roller-coaster of a mystery, filled with dead ends and triumphs, hope and despair. The story it explores complex subjects, including consciousness, quality of life, and the nation’s immigration debate.