O.C. Murder Steeped in Tragedy, Poverty : Young Man Fatally Shot on Freeway Sent Vital Aid Back to His Family in Poor Mexican Village

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 Jesus.

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 Juan Pedro was in a back room, where he kept three “boom boxes” and suitcases full of California clothes that he had purchased in “ El Norte ,” the United States.

Finally, on Saturday, one 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, Juan Pedro 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, not only because it seemed an unprovoked and random tragedy, 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 tiny 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,” his father, Pedro Trujillo, said. “You can ask anyone around here. Before he left to go to 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 through 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 80 kilometers 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 father to several sons.

Juan Pedro’s father grows sorghum or corn on the plot his father gave him. Every year, the yield diminishes as the soil is used up further. 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. Pedro told his son, who was then 18, that it was time for him to go, too.

“My friend knows people there in El Norte ; they will help you find work,” Pedro said he told his son.

“And he told me, ‘But Apa , how will we pay for (the trip north).’ I told him I would find a way.”

Pedro asked a friend for the money to pay a coyote to sneak Juan Pedro across the border. In exchange, Pedro turned his farmlands over to the man for an entire season, allowing him to grow and sell the crop that it produced that would have otherwise fed Pedro’s family.

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, and Juan Pedro, his younger brother, Guillermo, a cousin and another friend.

Eventually, Juan Pedro applied for amnesty and started working at the Big O Tires store in Santa Ana. He regularly sent money home to his parents, even though he only earned about $250 a week.

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

The young man returned to Orange County in April when the construction money ran out. “He said he would go back to earn more for the rest,” Pedro said.

The brother, Guillermo, and his sister, Carmen, say that 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, 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 for a snack.

A scuffle began at a nearby table, but Orange police detectives say they are convinced that Juan Pedro and his brother and cousin had nothing to do with it.

As they were driving home on the Santa Ana Freeway, a route they knew so 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,” Guillermo said.

Juan Pedro’s head fell on his brother’s shoulder. His blood would soak 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 UCI Medical Center in Orange. Police believe that the car bearing the assailant was a dark-colored Cutlass Oldsmobile, 1978-1980, but they have no other clues.

“It’s just very tough to solve a drive-by shooting because there are limited witnesses, limited physical evidence,” said Sgt. Larry Pore, who is supervising the investigation. Authorities know there was one other car whose passengers may have witnessed the incident, but they have yet to hear from the occupants.

“We’re looking for one concrete piece of evidence, a phone call that will lead us in the right direction,” Pore said. “On most of these things, (those responsible) have a tendency to brag about it. Their bragging is our best clue and their worst enemy.”

Guillermo is inconsolable. He has recounted the story so many times since returning to El Juamuchil, but he still 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, during the hottest part of the day, four men hoisted Juan Pedro’s coffin onto their shoulders and carried him down the dirt road past a small herd of black and white dairy cows.

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

“Life is subject to uncertainties,” the priest said. “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 that he would marry her in December when he returned again from Anaheim. He would first have a simple civil ceremony because he did not have the money for a big church wedding, he had told his family.

Carmen, his mother, said that she told him: “Even if I have to go begging people for the money, I will have a church wedding for you, hijo. I want to see you married.”

On Saturday, Josefina had sneaked out of her parents’ house and made the three-hour trip to El Juamuchil 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 here 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 the coffin and buried with him, Josefina’s return address visible on the envelopes.