Sealed Trailer Becomes Coffin : Death, on a Second Visit, Claims 2 in Mobile Home

When William and Julia Morkin moved to this rural North County community nine years ago to retire, they settled into a small mobile home tucked on the ledge of a hillside overlooking acres of finely groomed orange groves.

While their little hilltop hideaway was modest at best and the road leading to it narrow, curving and, for the last two miles, unpaved, the setting was majestic. On days like Friday, the sun’s sparkling reflection could be seen off the Pacific, more than 20 miles away, and the wind generated a soothing rustle through the luxuriant groves.

But with the setting sun came another cold night, prompting the Morkins to seal up their house to keep out the drafts and keep in the heat.

Last winter, they nearly died when they taped around the windows and vents and turned on their propane stove burners for warmth. Discovering that they were getting woozy--their oxygen was being consumed by the burners--they barely escaped death.

This week, though, their error played itself out to a fatal conclusion. Again sealing their house against the cold, they created a coffin that on Thursday night gave up the dead bodies of William Morkin and a Mexican farmworker who had been living with the couple for three months. Miraculously, Julia Morkin survived and was recovering Friday at Fallbrook Hospital from carbon monoxide poisoning.

This time, the burner wasn’t the accessory to the tragedy. It was a propane lantern that consumed virtually all the life-sustaining oxygen in the two-room home, replacing it with carbon monoxide.

“They kept the cold air from coming in but they kept the bad air from escaping,” said Sheriff’s Detective Bob Burger.

The farmworker, identified as Javier Rios Trejos, 26, may have succumbed as early as Monday night. Deputy Coroner Penne Hammerstead, who is investigating the deaths, said Trejos reported to work on Monday but didn’t show up on Tuesday. His employer knocked on the trailer door, but there was no answer and the man left, apparently unaware of the tragedy unfolding on the other side of the door. Trejos’ body was found on the upper bunk of a bed in the living room of the trailer--only inches from the ceiling, where the oxygen would have been thin first.

Hammerstead said Morkin, a 60-year-old retired mechanic, may have been dead for more than a day. His body was found on the living room floor, just a couple of feet from the propane lantern.

Julia Morkin, 57, told investigators she passed out sometime Monday--perhaps in the back part of the mobile home, where there may have been more oxygen.

She was discovered by her son, John Minjares, who lives in nearby Fallbrook and who, concerned that his mother and stepfather hadn’t made their customary trip to Fallbrook on Tuesday, drove to the couple’s trailer Thursday evening to check on them.

Disoriented and in a daze, Julia Morkin met her son at the door of the trailer when he arrived, and said she had been unconscious since Monday. “I think your father is already gone,” she told her son, according to Hammerstead.

Minjares rushed his mother to Fallbrook Hospital, then called authorities, notifying them of the possible deaths. The trailer is so remote, tucked away through several canyons on the eastern side of Rainbow, that even local volunteer firemen had trouble finding it.