Family of Aliens Helped to Reunite With Abused Son

Fortune smiled on the beleaguered Mercado family Monday.

Maria Guadalupe Mercado and her five children, who tried to cross illegally into the United States after learning that her eldest son had been sexually abused in Los Angeles, were released by immigration authorities after an anonymous donor posted a $3,500 bond on their behalf.

And in Los Angeles Municipal Court, Dennis Schrader, 37, the man accused of sexually abusing Mercado’s 13-year-old son, pleaded guilty to one count of child molestation, relieving the boy of having to attend protracted criminal proceedings in the case.

After their release from the downtown Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center, the mother and the five children were reunited with her husband, Luis, and their 13-year-old son at a nearby apartment.

Although marred by graffiti and infested with cockroaches, the dilapidated apartment was an improvement over the car that the boy and his father had slept in for several months after Luis Mercado injured his back working as a farm laborer and made his way to Los Angeles.

It was this desperate situation that Luis Mercado said led him reluctantly to accept Schrader’s offer: a home for the youth in exchange for housework. According to the boy, however, Schrader sexually abused him and threatened to turn him and his father over to the INS if he told about it.

Change of Fortune

On Monday, all that seemed behind them.

“It’s a very good day for me,” said the boy, smiling broadly. Before long, he had run off to play with his younger brothers.

The boy is receiving treatment through the Crime Victim Center Inc., a nonprofit, publicly funded service center in Los Angeles that had tried to ease the way for the rest of the family to join the boy and his father in the United States.

Mercado and his wife initially said that it was a letter from the center--urging her to come to Los Angeles from her native Mexico to lend the boy emotional support--that spurred her to come here.

But Monday, the couple admitted that, as the center has since explained, it was Luis Mercado who had solicited the letter after his wife had already decided to come to Los Angeles from her hometown in central Mexico.

Trying to Help the Youth

“It was not our intent to encourage her to do anything illegal,” said Nancy Kless, the center’s executive director. “We were just trying to do the best we could to help (the boy).”

Kless said that her expectation was that the mother would present herself to border officials and that the letter might help gain her admittance.

“Maybe we stuck our necks out a bit, but (in hindsight) I’m not sure we would have done anything differently,” Kless added.

The mother and her five children were arrested by immigration authorities near the border two weeks ago. They were scheduled for a deportation hearing today, but the hearing was delayed when a donor, who asked to remain anonymous, put up the entire bond for the family’s release after reading a story in The Times about their plight.

Changed His Plea

Schrader, the accused molester, had previously pleaded not guilty to charges of oral copulation and sodomy with a minor by force or threat. A preliminary hearing on those charges had been set for mid-August. But Monday he pleaded guilty to one count of child molestation.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathleen Kennedy-Powell said that her office agreed to accept Schrader’s plea to a child molestation charge because “the penalties are the same . . . and he is sparing the victim the trauma of going through the testimony.”

But Kennedy-Powell said she still expects to have the 13-year-old testify briefly at Schrader’s sentencing on Aug. 16. “I want to make sure that the judge is clearly aware of what did happen,” she said.

Facing Deportation

The family--including the boy’s father, Luis Mercado, arrested earlier by immigration authorities for allegedly being in the country illegally--still face deportation proceedings.

According to the Mercados’ lawyer, Antonio Rodriguez of the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice, it usually takes several months to schedule a deportation hearing after suspected illegal immigrants are bailed out.

As has been their intent all along, the Mercados hope to remain at their son’s side until criminal proceedings are completed. The boy’s father also hopes to be allowed to remain long enough in the country to process a worker’s compensation claim over the back injury he suffered.

Noting that the boy might require extended psychological treatment as a result of the sexual abuse, Rodriguez said he hopes immigration authorities take this into account before they return the family to Mexico, where the chances of receiving such care are slim, if not impossible.