Alien Family Caught in Web of Sex Abuse Case, INS Wrangle

Luis Mercado “was ready to kill,” he said, when his 13-year-old son told him that the “nice, seemingly compassionate” man to whom he had been entrusted as a live-in housekeeper had sexually abused him. The well-dressed, clean-cut man, who spoke a little Spanish, had approached the destitute father and son on a downtown Los Angeles street and offered to help.

Mercado, who with his son had resorted to living out of their car and selling oranges on street corners after a back injury forced him to quit his job as a farm laborer in the Imperial Valley, reluctantly agreed.

When Mercado’s wife, Maria Guadalupe, received word about the assault on her eldest son from a crime victims’ group in Los Angeles and was urged to join him, she sold her meager household belongings, packed up the couple’s five other children and headed north from Leon in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato.

Last week, in desperation, Maria Guadalupe Mercado and her brood tried to cross the border illegally into the United States. They didn’t make it.

Now, the mother and children, who were arrested by U.S. Border Patrol officers, are in custody at the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center in Pasadena. Lawyers representing the Mercados and the crime victims’ group say the boy needs his family’s support while he goes through pending criminal proceedings.

Although an intensely personal story, the Mercado family’s Job-like struggle against poverty and abuse is in many ways shared by the thousands of immigrants who daily take the risk of illegally crossing the U.S. border.

Earlier this week, seated in the stark surroundings of the immigration service’s downtown detention center, Maria Guadalupe Mercado’s eyes reddened with tears.

“I wanted to be with my son,” she said.

Maria Guadalupe Mercado, 28, a shy woman who wears no makeup and looks several years younger than her age, cradled her youngest child, Carina, in her arms, trying to quiet her.

She has not seen her eldest son in a year, and said she is anxious to “do all I can to care of him.”

“He’s such a good boy. He has a noble heart, he’s so calm and has always been so obedient. . . ,” she said.

“I argued with my husband that he shouldn’t take (the boy) with him,” she said in Spanish, describing the day last summer when her son grudgingly boarded the bus with his father and left their hometown for El Norte .

“I knew he wouldn’t know how to take care of him,” she said. “I was left feeling sad and worried.”

Luis Mercado, 33, a shoemaker by trade, has come and gone illegally between Mexico and the United States since 1978, when he “got it into (his) head,” he said, to take the risk that so many of his friends back home talked about.

“I’d heard all the tales about how you can sweep coins from the street here,” he said. “Ambition drove me.”

Although he missed the children, Mercado said that in the United States--working in shoe factories, as a carpenter, a newspaper distributor and a farm laborer--he earned enough money to support himself and his family “without having to work day and night like back home.”

But Mercado’s luck ran out when the work injury last fall landed him in the hospital for two weeks.

Sent Money Home

“We had done all right until then,” Mercado said. He and his son had worked as field laborers in Bakersfield, Lancaster and the Imperial Valley. And they regularly sent part of their paychecks home.

No longer able to do heavy work, however, Mercado resorted to selling fruit on the streets of East Los Angeles and sometimes joined the early morning crowd at the day labor pickup spots where other immigrants joust for jobs. The father and his son lived out of a car they bought for $50.

“We had to sell everything we had just to eat,” Mercado said, “our stereo radio, our watches, even our clothes.”

So, when they were approached at a downtown video arcade and the boy was offered a home in exchange for housework, Mercado took the boy to the stranger’s “luxurious” Wilshire District address the next day.

“My son was suffering with me, so I thought that this way he’ll at least have a roof over his head,” Mercado recalled. “I trusted him (the stranger).”

Boy Kept Abuse Secret

Although the boy was almost in daily contact with his father, he kept the sexual abuse a secret, he said, because the man threatened to report him and his father to immigration authorities if he told.

“He said that the police wouldn’t do anything to him because he had (financial) resources and we had no power,” the soft-spoken boy said, almost in a whisper.

The youngster had lived at the Wilshire apartment about a month when he told his father that the man had thrown a bottle at him, grazing his head. His host was angry at the boy for running up large telephone bills on calls to his hometown.

The boy left and Mercado noticed that his son was unusually quiet. A few days later, he went to the police.

“At first he didn’t want to tell me, but I reassured him,” he said. “Finally, he started crying and told me about the threats.”

‘I Couldn’t Take It’

When his son began detailing the abuse to police investigators, Mercado said, he left the room. “I couldn’t take it,” he said.

Dennis G. Schrader, 37, was arrested and charged with oral copulation and sodomy with a minor by force or threat. He has pleaded not guilty.

According to Juan Dominguez, a Los Angeles Police Department investigator, the boy told him that he had not complained about the alleged sexual abuse because he did not want to go back to the streets.

“The boy said he would rather endure the humiliation than go back to living in that car,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathleen Kennedy-Powell. “And he also said he felt it was partly his fault,” she said, describing this as a common reaction.

“It’s a pitiful case,” she said.

Back in Mexico, Maria Guadalupe Mercado was forced to leave the children home alone and go to work when the checks from her husband stopped arriving. The $70 a month that she earned at a shoe factory wasn’t enough to feed the children, she said.

“We often went hungry,” she said.

“I hadn’t received a single word from Luis and (my son). I didn’t know what was going on. . . . The baby got sick and had to be hospitalized,” she said. “I was desperate.”

Then, the letter arrived. The medical director of the Crime Victim Center Inc., a nonprofit service center in Los Angeles, wrote to inform her that her eldest son had been the victim of sexual abuse and urged her to come to Los Angeles as soon as possible to lend him emotional support.

Maria Guadalupe Mercado sold her pots and pans and dishes, borrowed a little money from a sister and headed north.

Showed Her Letter

When she and her children were apprehended after crossing the border, she said, she showed border patrol officers the letter from the Crime Victim Center.

“They told me it wouldn’t do me any good,” she said.

Cliff Rogers, immigration service deputy district director, said in San Diego that the victim center should have contacted the immigration service beforehand to arrange for her admittance.

He said the immigration service has indicated that it might allow the mother to stay here temporarily to be with her son if her husband would take the other children back to Mexico. Or, Rogers said, “they could all return to Mexico and we could allow the mother, father and the boy to come back up when and if the trial came up.”

Sonia Kyle, Crime Victim Center clinic coordinator, declined to discuss the matter on the grounds that it is confidential.

Await Hearings

Because Maria Guadalupe Mercado declined to sign a voluntary departure form for return to Mexico, she and the children were brought to Los Angeles pending a deportation hearing. Her husband, who is free on his own recognizance on an earlier arrest by the immigration service, faces a similar hearing.

Antonio Rodriguez, director of the Center for Law and Justice in East Los Angeles, said an appeal to immigration authorities that the family be released on their own recognizance, “purely on humanitarian grounds,” was denied.

He argued that the Mercado boy’s emotional recuperation is dependent on the support of his family. Bail for the family was set at $3,500.

Rodriguez has contacted Spanish-language radio and television stations, as well as a mutual aid organization of immigrants in Los Angeles, for help in raising bond money.

Kennedy-Powell said the Schrader case has been continued to Aug. 15 for a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court because the defense attorney will be on vacation through July.

Delays Bother Official

It is the possibility of still more delays that bothers Rogers of the immigration service.

Noting that the case might drag on for months, he said that to ask that the entire family be allowed to remain in the United States until its conclusion would be “asking us to create a situation where a woman and children can come up here and live in squalor or apply for some kind of aid.”

Luis Mercado, meantime, oblivious to the legalities that keep him apart from his wife and children at a time of crisis, has only one concern: reuniting the family.

“My family shouldn’t be in jail,” he said. “That’s not right, is it?”