Tragic Crossing : Coping With Coma, Grief in Tijuana

Juan Jose Buenrostro, his body wasted to almost nothing, lies motionless on his bed, his dark eyes seemingly transfixed on a spot on the ceiling.

He makes no sound and does not move. Only the occasional flicker of an eyelid, a quivering lip, speaks of the life within him.

At his side, Esther Esquivel de Buenrostro leans over and gently strokes her husband’s curly black hair. His eyes seem to register her touch, but they remain locked on the imaginary dot on the ceiling.

“Juan,” she whispers in his ear. “We have another baby. She was born two weeks ago. Her name is Crystal.”

“She loves you, Juan.”

Only Juan Jose Buenrostro knows why he slid under the yellow school bus and strapped himself to the frame with his leather belt.

Danger Ignored

Perhaps he saw it as the easiest and quickest way to get across the border and, in the bravado of youth, downplayed its danger. Maybe he had done it before, one of the countless times that he had sneaked across the border.

Like many in Mexico, when things got difficult at home he always looked north, where the work was hard but the pay was good. He had been there many times before as a teen-ager, working the fields around Fresno and washing dirty dishes in the restaurants of San Diego.

But this time Buenrostro would not return with his pockets full of dollars and his head full of stories about life on the other side. This time, he would return as a cripple.

The last time anyone in Tijuana recalls seeing Buenrostro was a Saturday morning in mid-December. His wife recalls that he was nervous and fidgety, apparently worried about his ability to provide for a growing family on the $10 to $15 a week he earned working with his mother selling toys, used clothing and other cheap trinkets at the Tijuana Swap Meet.

Saw School Bus

Later that day, between 3 and 5 p.m., he happened upon an American school bus parked in front of the Tijuana Cultural Center. The bus had carried members of the Orange Coast College Spanish Club to Tijuana for a field trip, and the Cultural Center marked the end of the tour.

While the students were inside watching a movie on Mexican history, Buenrostro crawled under the bus and wedged himself between the frame and the differential gear, securing his body to the carriage by looping a leather belt around his waist and over the frame. Then he waited.

Buenrostro remained safely hidden for the three hours it took to get across the border, but soon something went wrong.

As the students joked and sang while the bus rumbled north on Interstate 5, some became aware of a faint knocking coming from the area around the rear wheel wells. One student would say later that it sounded like someone pounding the floorboard from underneath the bus.

“We didn’t know what it was,” said Robbie Shaw, 18, a sophomore from Costa Mesa. “It sounded like a thud coming from underneath the bus. I thought something was wrong with the bus. We really didn’t think a whole lot about it at first.”

For the next 40 minutes the thumping continued, growing progressively louder. At one point, Shaw remembered some of the students trying to imitate the sound by stomping their feet. Someone suggested the wheel was about to fall off; another guessed that maybe the muffler was loose.

The noise didn’t stop until the bus made its first rest stop at a restaurant in Carlsbad. As it coasted into the parking lot, Buenrostro fell limply to the pavement.

‘Left Arm Was Hanging’

Carlsbad Police Lt. Don Lewis said the investigating officer found “the victim’s left arm was hanging suspended by remnants of his jacket and shirt from the universal joint (of the bus).”

“There was evidence,” said Lewis “that the victim had been riding atop the differential and had become entangled on the bolts protruding from the U-joint. Additionally, the victim was run over by both sets of rear wheels after being thrown under the bus.”

Lewis said Buenrostro’s arm could have become snagged in the drive shaft as he tried to dismount when the bus pulled into the parking lot. But Lewis said it was also possible that this could have happened miles down the interstate, raising the specter that Buenrostro was crying for help pounding on the floorboard while his arm was being slowly chewed off.

“Since . . . he can’t talk, we’ll never know exactly how it happened,” Lewis said.

Buenrostro was taken by helicopter to UC San Diego Medical Center on the night of Dec. 12, 1987. He was admitted with severe head injuries, a blood clot in his brain and a traumatically amputated left arm. Doctors did not expect him to live through the night.

But he did survive. He remained hospitalized for six weeks, never regaining consciousness. His family, who had been notified the day of the accident, remained at his bedside throughout.

Although still in a coma, Buenrostro was released Feb. 1 into the care of his mother. Mexico has no form of social welfare, and lacking the ability to pay for private medical care, his mother simply took her son home to Tijuana.

There, in the modest yellow house on a dirt street in Colonia Francisco Villa, Enedina Montero de Buenrostro began caring for her son, now even more helpless than the infant she gave birth to 31 years ago.

She changes his diaper, applies body cream to keep him from getting bed sores and mixes the cereal, corn oil, honey and vegetables into the blender for his twice daily feeding though a rubber tube leading to his stomach.

“He’s like a baby again,” his mother says, “a little child who needs to be cared for.”

When he was released, doctors gave Buenrostro a 5% chance of making a partial recovery. The miracle, they said, is that he had survived at all.

Needs Therapy

The family says he has made some progress--he now opens his eyes although he has trouble moving them--and hopes that he may soon be able to breathe without the plastic tube that was inserted into this throat. Yet he still requires the kind of physical therapy that the family simply cannot provide.

“We can’t leave him alone one minute,” his mother said. “One time late at night, I woke up to find he had fallen off the bed. He wants to move and tries to move, but he can’t control himself. I must be here at all times. My life has become caring for my son.”

The family has eked by on the generosity of friends and strangers. A cousin donated $50, a friend $10. Someone found an old hospital bed and it now sits in the house’s only bedroom.

At night, Buenrostro’s mother says she will wake to find her son awake, staring at the ceiling. She is convinced he is mentally sound.

“I can see it in his eyes,” she says with conviction. “I know that Juan, my little baby, hears us and knows we’re near. If we could get help, maybe he could recover more.”

But that may be difficult. With her son back home and dependent on round-the-clock care, she was forced to quit her cleaning job of 13 years at a doctor’s home in San Diego to spend all her time with her son. And that means the loss not only of a steady income, but of an income in dollars, so crucial in the ailing Mexican economy.

Her husband, she said, tends to the swap meet stall that brings in anywhere from $10 to $50 a week. The expenses for caring for her son run easily twice that. A local doctor drops by twice a week to check for infections at $20 a visit, and there is the medicine, adult diapers, catheters and plastic syringes available only in the United States.

The Orange Coast College Spanish Club has raised money and food for Buenrostro’s wife, Esther, and children, and now plans to collect donations for his home care in Tijuana.

Luana Shapiro, a Newport Beach resident and the club’s president, said Buenrostro’s plight brought home the poverty of many Mexican families.

“I think it’s made us all see how fortunate we are as Americans, and made us feel that if we can just do a little to help other people, it will make this a better world,” said Shapiro, who was on the bus the day of the accident.

Like most of the young men who grow up in poverty in Tijuana, Buenrostro only wanted a little more out of life. As a teen-ager, he traveled to Los Angeles often, first as a tourist and later, illegally.

Since his marriage to Esther in 1982, his trips across the border for day jobs became more frequent. The family spent so much time in the United States, in fact, that two of their four daughters were born there and Esther has now qualified for residency under the amnesty program.

Esther said that because Buenrostro has not applied for U.S. residency, he cannot legally re-enter the United States without a special visa. The family would like to find a suitable home for him north of the border, someplace where he could receive physical therapy, but it has neither the money nor the special visa required.

For now, Esther and their children have moved in with her sister, Eva, and her husband, Guadalupe Amezola, in their two-bedroom frame house in San Diego.

There, amid the clutter of six children and five adults, she considers a future without the man she has known since grade school. She would like to find work in the United States, to learn English, to provide for a better life for her children.

“It would be so much easier with Juan,” she said recently, clutching an oil painting of the newlywed couple, Buenrostro striking a handsome pose in a tweed jacket with dark brown elbow patches and a chocolate tie.

“We grew up three blocks from each other,” she added. “It seems like I have always known him and depended on him.”

But it is their children, she says, who will one day suffer the most.

“The oldest ones, Dulce (5 years old) and Leslie (4) don’t really understand what has happened,” Esther explained. “They know that papi has been in an accident, but they keep asking when he’s going to come home.”

To make matters worse, Mexican-born Dulce and Leslie cannot visit their father because they have no papers to cross the border and re-enter the United States, even though their mother has qualified for residency. The other two girls, Jasmine, 3, and Crystal, 2 weeks, were born in the United States and can cross the border without problem.

Child Doesn’t Understand

“I took Jasmine to see him in April,” Esther said. “She sat on the bed and kissed him. She talked to him but he didn’t answer. She turned to me and said, ‘Why won’t papi answer me, mama? Is he mad at me?”’

Seated on worn sofas in her sister’s San Diego house, Esther and other members of the family grope for an answer to why Buenrostro hid himself underneath the bus that Saturday in December.

He never told anyone he was going to cross the border, but his behavior in the days leading to the accident sheds light on his motives.

“I remember the days before this happened,” she said. “Juan was nervous, very nervous about our family. He had been working at the swap meet and he wasn’t making much money.”

She paused, shifted the weight of baby Crystal in her arms, and began again in a softer voice.

“He was nervous because I had told him I was pregnant again,” she said. “A fourth child. Maybe that was why he went, because he was scared for his family. He just wanted to make things right for his children.”