Town’s Vital Thread From ‘El Norte’ Is Severed by Fatal Shots on Freeway

Friends and relatives had been coming by the tiny house for days, trudging up the rutted dirt roads, waiting for the coffin to arrive.

Women in their best black dresses and lacy mantillas and men with their hats in their hands sat in chairs rimming the edge of a room where one candle burned in front of a picture of Christ.

It was the house that Juan Pedro Trujillo was building. The floor was dirt, weeds were growing in one of the rooms that still had no roof, and the red brick, crudely held together by cement, was exposed on many of the walls. The only sign of Trujillo was in a back room, where he kept three “boom boxes” and suitcases full of California clothes he had purchased in “El Norte,” the United States.

Finally, on Saturday, a full week after Trujillo was gunned down at the wheel of his pickup truck as he was driving down the Santa Ana Freeway in Orange, his body was delivered to his family in this impoverished village in central Mexico.

And for one final night, Trujillo rested in his family’s home, among the candles and the flowers and the sorrow.

The shooting of the 22-year-old Mexican man has baffled police in Southern California, not only because it seemed unprovoked and random, but also because there have been so few incidents like it since a spate of highway violence two summers ago drew national attention to Southern California.

But in this village with no telephones, the incident broke a delicate thread of economic support that had tied Trujillo’s life in California to his family in Mexico.

“Everything we have comes from the sweat of Juan Pedro,” said his father, Pedro Trujillo. “You can ask anyone around here--before he left to go work in El Norte, we had nothing.”

It is the refrain of El Juamuchil. Mothers fret about sons who leave at a tender age to seek work in the United States, but point proudly at the homes they have built with the money they send back. Girlfriends talk wistfully of young men from their town who write love letters from places like Anaheim, San Mateo and Chino, asking for their hands, promising to take them away from this small town. And fathers who, although they also may have spent some of their youth up north, feel slightly ashamed that the land their fathers left them is no longer enough to support a family.

“Here in Mexico we lack so much that one waits for what they send us,” said Juan Pedro’s aunt Ramona Toribio Barajas, whose four sons are in California. “This is why so many from the town go to El Norte.”

El Juamuchil, in the state of Jalisco about 50 miles southeast of Guadalajara, is an ejido, a piece of land that was divided up after the Mexican revolution among the peasants who had worked it for large landowners. But with each generation, the parcels grow ever smaller as the land passes from fathers to several sons.

Juan Pedro’s father grows sorghum or corn on the plot his father left him. Every year, the yield diminishes as the soil is depleted. Pedro Trujillo was overjoyed when Juan Pedro was born after he and his wife, Carmen, had had three daughters.

“Juan Pedro would help me from the time he was very little,” his father said.

One day, a friend told Pedro Trujillo that he was going to the United States to work. So he told Juan Pedro, who was then 18, that it was time for him to go, too.

Initially, Juan Pedro went to Oregon to pick strawberries. After a few months, he went to stay with his sister Carmen, who was then living in Santa Ana with her husband and children.

Two months ago, they moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Anaheim--Carmen and her husband and their six children, as well as Juan Pedro, his younger brother Guillermo, a cousin and another friend.

Eventually, Juan Pedro applied for amnesty and began work at a tire store in Santa Ana. He regularly sent money home to his parents, even though he earned only about $250 a week.

Last November, he went back to Mexico to help his father build the new house that they had started the year before. It was meant to replace the little shack where the family had grown up.

He returned to Orange County in April when they ran out of construction money.

Carmen and Guillermo say Juan Pedro was a family-oriented man, who did not go out often without the rest of his family in Anaheim.

But on Saturday night, Aug. 5, after a small party in a neighbor’s apartment, Juan Pedro, Guillermo and their cousin Rene Trujillo drove in Juan Pedro’s beat-up pickup truck to Taqueria Guadalajara on 1st Street in northern Santa Ana to eat.

As they drove home on Interstate 5, a route they knew well by now, they laughed and joked, Guillermo said. Suddenly, they heard a crack. Juan Pedro thought it might be a flat tire.

“When he turned to look, that’s when they hit him,” said Guillermo.

Juan Pedro’s head fell on his brother’s shoulder. His blood would be smeared all over Guillermo’s clothes by the time he and his cousin grabbed the wheel and drove in a panic to their Anaheim home.

Juan Pedro died at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange. Police believe the car from which the shot was fired was an older, dark-colored Oldsmobile Cutlass, but they have no other clues.

His brother is inconsolable. He has recounted the story many times since returning to El Juamuchil, but still he trembles when he talks.

“In the blink of an eye, everything is finished,” he said.

“Just because one man wants to take another man’s life, why does this have to happen?” he said.

“He was more than a brother to me. He was like a second father, but much more than that.”

Sunday afternoon, in the hottest part of the day, four men hoisted Juan Pedro’s coffin onto their shoulders and carried it down the dirt road, past a small herd of dairy cows.

The townspeople and others from miles away trailed behind, and then crowded into El Juamuchil’s tiny church, a tall building made of the same red brick.

“Life is subject to uncertainties,” said the priest. “Life is subject to limitations.”

After the Mass, 24 pickup trucks and other cars crammed with mourners made their way to a cemetery in La Barca, three miles away, and there they stood as Juan Pedro’s body was lowered into the ground.

Missing from Sunday’s crowd was a 16-year-old girl who had been at the house the day before.

Her name was Josefina, and Juan Pedro had told his family he would marry her in December when he returned again from Anaheim.

On Saturday, Josefina had sneaked out of her parents’ house and made the three-hour trip from her town by bus and dirt road, bearing red and white carnations, because she had been told that Juan Pedro’s coffin would be there by then. But when she learned that his body had not yet arrived, she collapsed and Juan Pedro’s sister took her into his room. When she regained her composure, she quickly left the Trujillo home, not talking to anyone.

In the days after Juan Pedro died, letters for him had arrived in Anaheim. The unopened letters were placed in his coffin and buried with him, Josefina’s return address visible on the envelopes.