‘Never Do This Again,’ Alien Vows After Pursuit

The last thing Martin Rivera remembers is a companion shouting at him to go faster, away from la migra as they were being chased at midnight Sunday after running the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 5.

The car carrying Rivera and nine other illegal aliens from Mexico swerved out of control, and the next thing Rivera knew he was in the intensive care unit of San Clemente General Hospital, where he was being treated for a concussion.

“I will never do this again,” Rivera, 23, driver of the crashed vehicle, said in Spanish Tuesday in a bedside interview at the hospital.

In the estimation of the California Highway Patrol, Rivera and the nine other occupants of the car are lucky to be alive. After being chased for 12 miles north on Interstate 5, their 1974 Plymouth Duster left the road at more than 60 m.p.h., became airborne and flipped end over end down a 75-foot embankment, spilling out all the occupants.

Rivera and three others were hospitalized in conditions ranging from serious to good, while all the other illegals were treated and released for minor injuries. Rivera was to be released today.

Rivera, groggy from having slept almost continually since he first regained consciousness Monday, said this was his first illegal foray into the United States. He said he had decided to journey here this week and work for a few days so he could send money home to his impoverished family in time for Christmas.

Rivera’s family, a mother and brother, live in an ejido --a farming cooperative--in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Although he has no family here, Rivera said he had planned to get a manual labor job through friends in Los Angeles, where he was heading at the time of the accident.

Rivera said he had been instructed by his coyote (smuggler) to cross the border at Tijuana and pick up the Duster left parked in neighboring San Ysidro. He was to drive himself and nine other illegals he had not previously met up to Los Angeles, where they would then all pay their transportation fees. Rivera said he was not sure how much that fee would be, since his friends had agreed to take care of the bill.

Rivera said he encountered no difficulty in hiking Sunday night across the rugged canyons and hills that separate Tijuana from San Ysidro. He said he found the car with no problem and loaded it with four illegals in the trunk and the rest in the front and rear seats. Two women, ages 20 and 21, were in the group. The rest were men, ages 18-34.

The overloaded Duster headed north to Los Angeles on Interstate 5. Like all other vehicles traveling in that direction that night, it was forced to slow for inspection at the immigration checkpoint south of San Clemente. A uniformed agent looked at Rivera, then motioned for him to pull over.

“A passenger in back said to step on the gas and I panicked,” Rivera said, fidgeting uncomfortably on his bed as nurses and hospital officials stood by. “That’s when I started speeding.”

Rivera said he did not want to participate in a chase and would have stopped the car shortly had it not been for another passenger, seated in the front, who kept shouting for him to keep going.

“He was telling me to go straight ahead, step on the gas and not stop,” Rivera said, noting that the car was pulling away from pursuing agents in two marked cars. “The back of the car was sliding sideways (from all the human weight), and that’s when I went out of control.”

Border Patrol agents chasing the Duster assisted local paramedics in tending to the injured. The agency has decided not to pursue detention of the illegals once they are treated, so all are being released into custody of relatives and friends, said Border Patrol spokesman Michael Nicely.

He said the patrol routinely sets illegal immigrants free in the United States if they have been injured in a major traffic accident.

Michele Luna, director of social services at San Clemente Hospital, said that she has contacted Rivera’s friends in Los Angeles and that they have arranged to pick him up after he is released.

Luna said the hospital staff has donated clothing to Rivera, because paramedics cut away all of his clothes--including his underwear--while checking him for injuries after the accident.

Richard E. Butler, hospital assistant administrator, said the hospital does not expect to collect money for treating Rivera because, like most other illegal aliens requiring medical treatment at the hospital, he has no money.

Butler said the hospital has asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service for reimbursement of treating illegal aliens but has been refused. The cost of treatment averages $1,000 a day, which, Butler said, the hospital will absorb.

Luna said most illegal aliens treated at the hospital are injured in traffic accidents resulting from pursuit by the Border Patrol on nearby Interstate 5.

Rivera, meanwhile, has no intentions of staying around the United States long, even if the Border Patrol lets him go free.

“I would rather go back to Mexico.”