An Accident that Destroyed His Sight Didn’t Harm Will to Live

He was loco, simple as that, a crazy drunk out to make a point with a shotgun. Jose Amador just got in the way.

Amador was sitting around with his friends late one Saturday evening at a small fig ranch in the hilly backcountry north of Escondido when Jesus Gallardo began mumbling in Spanish, barely coherent. “I’m going to have a ballad written about me,” he blurted. “I’m going to do something atrocious.”

When Gallardo stomped off in a huff, Amador and his friends paid no mind. A six-pack of beer or two or three will do that to a man, and Gallardo had been drinking at the ranch’s small, unlicensed cantina since that afternoon.

But then Gallardo returned waving the old shotgun he kept in his room. He aimed it at Amador’s friends. “Point that gun somewhere else or you’ll kill someone,” they warned. So Gallardo swung the gun toward Amador and pulled the trigger.

The shotgun blast hit the young Latino squarely in the face. Steel pellets ripped into his flesh, lodging in his eyes, cheek and jaw, and flattening his nose. Driving like a madman, his brother rushed Amador to the hospital, where doctors managed to tug him back from the brink.

Jesus Gallardo is in Soledad prison today, serving a 15-year sentence for the shooting.

Amador is serving a different sort of sentence, a life sentence. While doctors managed to repair his wounds, his eyes were another matter. Amador is blind.

As with other victims of such tragedies, society has attempted to mete out a just compensation. In January, the 22-year-old man got an award of more than $4 million spread over his lifetime to settle a lawsuit he filed against Gallardo and the ranch owner after the shooting in July, 1984.

But the story of Jose Amador goes beyond the headlines, beyond the news of another multimillion-dollar award by the courts. It is the tale of a young man’s persistence in the face of a terrible setback, of a strength of will that could not be shattered by a shotgun blast.

Amador was raised in Sombrette, a tiny hamlet in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. His father, Jose Luis, farmed small pieces of land, scratching out a meager living.

Like so many before and after him, Jose Sr. ultimately decided to seek his fortune in the north, leaving the family in 1969 to work as a migrant farm hand in the United States. He found jobs around Sacramento, Fresno and the San Fernando Valley, along the way sending money for his family to follow him into the United States.

Amador came into the country when he was barely 9. He attended public schools and rapidly became Americanized, learning English as if it were his first language.

But the Amadors were always a farm workers’ family. In 1983, the senior Amador moved the clan to the fig ranch along the winding roads in inland North County, where he became one of the foremen. As part of the deal, the family was supposed to help run the cantina that had been set up on the ranch.

Little more than a room with a pair of refrigerators for beer and a pay-for-play pool table in the center, the cantina would draw farm workers from throughout the area to trade stories and chug down beers after a day of laboring in the fields.

As the second eldest of five children, Amador bore the brunt of the responsibility for running the operation.

It was little wonder, then, that Amador got to know Jesus Gallardo. The brother-in-law of the ranch’s chief foreman, Gallardo did not work because of a back injury he had suffered. Instead, he would spend many days drinking and, as Jose remembers, causing trouble with his rowdy behavior.

Gallardo had been especially wild that Saturday three years ago, according to Amador. Shortly after quitting time, Gallardo got in a brawl with another farm worker. Wanting to quell the problems, Amador closed down the cantina. The group of revelers, complete with three-piece mariachi band, moved outside.

Unphased, Gallardo continued to drink, dancing with a buddy or by himself in the dirt, grabbing handfuls of dust and flinging it into the air. “He was acting kind of crazy,” Amador says today. “But I don’t think he was (too) drunk to fall down or anything.”

Then came the mumbling. And the boasts. And the gunshot.

Long Road to Recuperation

Amador spent the next month in the hospital, undergoing surgery to reconstruct his shattered nose, to mend his skin and pry out the buckshot that had lodged in his cheek and jaw.

He returned home to his family’s two-bedroom house on the ranch, weighed down with a load of despair. His teeth were still fractured and he faced nearly a year of dental reconstruction. His jaws were wired. For the next three months, he could take only blended food with a syringe.

“All through that, I was in a really deep, deep depression,” Amador recalls. “It was like I was contemplating suicide . . . I think I still hoped it was all a dream.”

Amador began to buck the sense of hopelessness, he said, by developing faith. He began to attend a local Roman Catholic church nearly every Sunday, although he skipped some because “I was too shy. I just sometimes felt like everyone was looking at me.”

His spirit was buoyed even more when Amador began school at the Los Angeles-based Foundation for the Junior Blind in early 1985. First, Amador learned how to get around despite his blindness, picking up the intricacies of using a cane. Later, he was taught to read and write Braille.

Other classes followed: personal management, typing, kitchen management, wood shop. Along the way, Amador got extra tutoring from his instructors so he could earn his high-school diploma.

When he graduated from the program in November, 1985, Amador was named student of the year by his instructors. They presented him with a plaque recognizing his “enthusiasm and perseverance in growing and learning.”

“I used to call him maestro because of the way he used his cane,” says Bob Perrone, a former instructor of Amador’s at the school. “He had a style and a grace about it. But it’s more than that. He opens people up to themselves. He’s got an unbounded enthusiasm for being alive.”

Perrone remembers feeling worried at first “because Jose seemed so OK, and it was really not that long after the accident. But he was very open after that with the pain and his trauma. I found that those things were just as real as his ability to joke around and be nice.

“Who he is has nothing to do with being blind, nothing to do with a large settlement. It has to do with his being Jose Amador.”

For nearly a year after the shooting, the family took no legal steps other than monitor the criminal proceedings against Gallardo. At the urging of a friend, however, Amador and his parents contacted Escondido attorneys David Ronquillo and Terry Singleton.

A lawsuit was filed in June, 1985, alleging that the ranch owner, Robert Stratton, should have known of Gallardo’s violent propensities and could have avoided the tragedy by ordering the undocumented worker to leave.

The suit prompted a fair measure of hostility from the ranch owner and other workers, Amador said. The chief foreman would talk with Amador’s father, issuing veiled threats, he said. Later, the ranch owner attempted to fire the elder Amador, but the effort was scuttled when Ronquillo intervened. Stratton and the ranch foreman could not be reached for comment.

Ronquillo said the family considered leaving, but had no money for another house and the father had no other job prospects. After returning from the Los Angeles area in 1986, Amador moved in again with his family at the small house on the ranch.

“We lived there all through the case,” he says. “It was a nightmare. We were living with people who would talk behind our backs, but at the same time try to be friends to our faces. It was ugly.”

Even after the settlement agreement was reached last January with the fig rancher and his insurance company, none of the money was released for two months and the family continued to live on the ranch.

But the first check eventually came, and it changed Jose Amador’s life forever.

The first thing the family did was buy a modest, four-bedroom stucco house in a quiet San Marcos neighborhood. It is single-level and adjacent to a park where Amador occasionally walks with his seeing-eye dog, Nova, a 3-year-old black Labrador retriever.

Amador bought furniture for the house and a new van for the family. A majority of the first $600,000 released under the settlement went for attorney fees, court costs and hospital bills. Enough was left over to start a savings account that, together with a monthly payment from the insurance company, gives Amador $1,900 a month to live on.

Under the settlement, Amador will get balloon payments ranging from about $250,000 to more than $500,000 every five years until he is in his 60s. While he is far from landed gentry right now, Amador’s financial situation should become increasingly better as the years role on, according to Walter Ulloa, a Carlsbad financial consultant who helped negotiate the settlement.

Ulloa and his partner, Manny Valdez, developed a close bond with Amador and his family, helping them find the new house and deal with paper work that cropped up because of the court settlement.

“They’ve done a lot of extra things normally people don’t do for their clients,” Amador says. “What I discovered from this tragedy is that there are lots of nice people out there, people who will go all out for you and not expect anything in return.”

Dreams of Teaching

Although he once dreamed of being a police officer or in the military, Amador now has set his sights on beginning school at Palomar College in San Marcos and studying to become a history or government teacher. He’s also toyed with the idea of doing some writing.

“I want to do something worthwhile, that I can be proud of,” he says. “And, hopefully, I’ll be able to do what all people do--have a girlfriend, get married, have responsibilities.”

Amador said he is “pretty shy when it comes to meeting people. I’m a little self conscious. I haven’t been getting out much lately.” Currently, he does not have a steady girlfriend, but figures he’ll begin meeting more people once he hits college.

Still, he and Nova--his constant and sometimes over-zealously devoted companion--do take strolls through the neighborhood most days, visiting a blind friend who lives nearby or going to the YMCA, where Amador lifts weights or swims. An erstwhile boxer in high school, he also has a barbell set at home.

To help his father, who does not speak English, Amador has set up a small gardening business, advertising in the PennySaver and taking all the calls from potential customers.

His mother, meanwhile, works at a silk-screen firm, while his older brother has a job at a fence company and a sister works at a local department store. The family also has applied for legal residency in the United States under the amnesty program being administered through the federal government.

While he likes to help out the family by going shopping, Amador admits that clothes are the hardest thing to pick out because “you have to trust someone else’s tastes.”

All his clothing has Braille tags stitched inside so he can match colors. To tell time, Amador wears a talking watch and also has a talking calculator. Several clocks in the family’s home also announce the hour.

On one wall is a book shelf filled with volumes of the Bible in Braille. Amador also keeps extensive Braille records of his court proceedings, financial records and the phone numbers of friends.

“Jose has come a tremendous way,” Manny Valdez says. “The strides he has taken despite this adversity are tremendous. He’s a guy who’s not going to sit here. He’s going to be a contributor to this country and our society.”

Indeed, Amador insists that the money he now gets because of the tragedy that befell him will never be the key to fulfillment in his life.

“More money, a bigger house or more cars, none of that would make me more happy,” he says. “ I’ll have to make myself happy--by going to school, by making friends. If you don’t have friends, you don’t have anything. You could have $1 billion but have nothing. All that shines isn’t gold.”