A severely brain damaged man who has spent the past 20 years in a California hospital has finally been named by a journalist who tracked down his family and spent four years by his bedside trying to prove he is conscious.

The man was dubbed 'Sixty-Six Garage' by trauma surgeons who treated him after he was in a car crash in June of 1999. That's the name he was known by for the first 16 years he spent in a vegetative state at Villa Coronado Skilled Nursing Facility in Coronado.

Then just before his 34th birthday in January 2016, investigative journalist Joann Faryon uncovered his real name, Ignacio, and the story behind how he got there.

In an article published by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Faryon details the two years she spent getting to know Ignacio, or Nacho, as his family called him.

A severely brain damaged man who has spent the past 20 years in a California hospital has finally been named by a journalist who tracked down his family and spent four years by his bedside trying to determine if he is conscious. The man was dubbed 'Sixty-Six Garage' by trauma surgeons who treated him after he was in a car crash in June of 1999. That's the name he was known by for the first 16 years he spent in a vegetative state before investigative journalist Joann Faryon uncovered his real name, Ignacio, in January of 2016

Fayron (pictured) detailed the two years she spent digging into Nacho's story in an article published by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday

Faryon said she had been reporting on people on life support at Villa for almost a year when she became compelled to dig into who this 'Sixty-Six Garage' was.

In 2015, facility director Ed Kirkpatrick said he gave Faryon access to the patient's room because 'he's a human being. And 16 years is too long to go without knowing who this was. We need to CSI the hell out of it'.

'For the next two years I would track down the people, documents and scientific evidence I needed to understand how an ordinary Mexican teenager lost his humanity after crossing the border, kept alive by a system that didn’t care enough to learn his name,' Fayron wrote.

At the time that she started digging, all that was known about Garage was that he had been in a car crash near the US-Mexico border in 1999.

Authorities assumed he was an undocumented immigrant because he only had a few pesos and a Mexican phone card in his pocket when his body was found in the road after the crash. Doctors estimated that he was born sometime in 1960.

Garage was being kept alive by feeding and breathing tubes and was determined to be in a vegetative state with no awareness of his surroundings.

Fayron said she began to suspect otherwise when he appeared to smile at her one day in early 2015. From then on she was determined to figure out if maybe he was 'still in there'.

She started by learning his daily routine through frequent visits to his hospital room.

'He appeared to move in and out of consciousness, sometimes smiling like a small child, other times staring at the ceiling and striking his right leg on the corner of the bed for hours,' she said.

'There were days when he looked catatonic, and days when he'd stare wide-eyed as though he was seeing everything around him — the feeding machine, the TV that hung on the wall across from him, and me — for the first time.'

In addition to being turned and bathed and having seven medications and food pumped into his system, Garage would undergo a painful procedure to clear the mucus from his throat multiple times a day.

The torturous procedure agitated Garage, causing him to tense up and go red in the face.

Fayron did her best to soothe him by counting on her fingers in Spanish as the suction tube went to work.

Faryon became compelled to dig into who 'Sixty-Six Garage' was in 2015. 'For the next two years I would track down the people, documents and scientific evidence I needed to understand how an ordinary Mexican teenager lost his humanity after crossing the border, kept alive by a system that didn’t care enough to learn his name,' she wrote in The Times. Ignacio is pictured in 2016, the year Fayron discovered his real name

Fayron clocked hundreds of hours by Garage's bedside between 2015 and 2017. The rest of her investigative efforts took place in California's Imperial Valley, where she worked to track down information about the crash.

She managed to find a copy of the accident report, which revealed that he had been in a pickup truck that collided with another car on its way down to the valley, where many undocumented workers make a living on vegetable farms.

Enrique Morones, founder of the migrant rights advocacy group Border Angels, helped Fayron track down Garage's real name by cross-referencing his fingerprints with Border Patrol records.

The prints matched a Mexican teenager named Ignacio who was detained three months before the crash.

The Mexican Consulate pulled up his birth certificate and located a woman living in Ohio who was later confirmed 99.5 percent certainty to be his sister.

Fayron tracked down the sister, Juliana, and traveled to Ohio to meet her in 2016.

Juliana explained that her little brother Nacho had left home in San José de las Flores, Oaxaca, Mexico, for the US when he was 17 years old in March 1999 after their parents died.

He called her a few weeks later and told her he'd been captured by Border Patrol. They released him back into Mexico, but he soon made the trip back to the US again.

Because she hadn't heard from him in nearly two decades, Juliana assumed he had died during his second trip across the border.

They were finally reunited in February 2016 when Juliana flew to California to visit him at Villa.

While Fayron wasn't there to witness the reunion, she said the nursing assistants believed Nacho recognized his sister.

By tracking down Ignacio's sister Juliana, Fayron learned that he had left home in San José de las Flores, Oaxaca, Mexico, for the US when he was 17 years old in March 1999. Fayron also brought in an expert in diagnosing consciousness, who determined that Ignacio is conscious at least some of the time - contradicting doctors' who said he was in a vegetative state

Having finally figured out who Sixty-Six Garage was, Fayron averted her attention to determining if he was actually in a vegetative state.

To do that she brought in an expert in diagnosing consciousness, Caroline Schnakers.

Through her work as an assistant director at the Casa Colina Research Institute in Pomona, Schnakers knew that 40 percent of the times doctors diagnose someone as being in a vegetative state, they are wrong.

To see examine whether they'd been right in Nacho's case, Schnakers administered a consciousness test called the JFK Coma-Recovery Scale Revised.

He scored 14 out of a possible 23 on the test, indicating that he was conscious at least some of the time, Schnakers said.

'He could hear, but he couldn't understand language. He could reach for objects, like a cup, but he didn't recognize what the object was for,' Fayron explained.

Schnakers determined that the pain Nacho experienced during his daily medical procedures had been complicating his recovery.

She thinks he likely only lives in the moment, with no concept of time, unaware of anything that happens outside of the room he is in.

Fayron took Schnaker's determinations as validation of what she had assumed since the day Nacho smiled at her - validation that there was still a person in there.