Family Tragedy Transcends Job Etiquette

We stood in the halo of a street lamp behind a chain-link fence as a driver approached from the darkness of the Tarmac, his tractor pulling a baggage cart that held two cardboard boxes--one big, one little.

“Human remains,” the boxes read.

As he came through the gates to our side, several people mobbed the driver and yelled out names. I yelled out “Trujillo.”

Times photographer Aurelio Jose Barrera and I had traveled to the Mexican state of Jalisco to write about what Juan Pedro Trujillo--the young Mexican man who had died from a semiautomatic rifle’s bullet fired at him as he drove down the Santa Ana Freeway on Aug. 6--had left behind.

In most news stories, journalists come to the scene--be it a fire, a murder or even a civic meeting--and observe and stand apart and take something back to write about. In El Juamuchil, we were to learn, there was no hiding behind the boundaries of professional distance.

Earlier, when we arrived in Juan Pedro Trujillo’s hometown, we walked into the front room of the family’s dim house, and the grief that confronted us was as powerful as hot air rushing from an oven door. Women in black sat around in chairs set up along the walls in this room with the dirt floor.

I asked, “Are the parents of Juan Pedro Trujillo here?” and a shrunken woman swathed in black stood up and said, “I am his mother.” I told her who I was, and immediately Carmen Trujillo fell into my arms, weeping about her lost son.

Two journalists from California, from El Norte . I don’t know what that meant to them. They asked if I had known Juan Pedro; how could I explain that my interest in them had begun with his death?

For two days, we waited with them, as they gathered up their grief in anticipation of the return of his body from Los Angeles. We translated documents for them from English into Spanish. His mother asked me for advice about the funeral; I told her to ask her daughters. And we went to look for his body.

There had never been any question that Juan Pedro would be returned to Mexico for burial. Like many Mexican immigrants, Juan Pedro’s life was spent going back and forth between two worlds--one that held economic opportunity, the other his heart and his family loyalty.

Unclear Instructions

But the task of bringing him home was complicated. Funeral arrangements had been made by Juan Pedro’s sister, Carmen, in Anaheim, whom he had lived with, and her husband. Neither, however, speaks English, and the details of what plane he would be on, his arrival time and who would deliver the body to his family in the rural town were never very clear. Any mixup could not easily be fixed with a telephone call, because there are no phones in the family’s town.

Originally, the word was that his body would be delivered to the little town by Friday morning. When we got there, it was that he would be there that evening. Then it was changed to Saturday morning. So by Saturday afternoon, when we left the family home for the night, we decided to drive to the airport.

Workers at several of the airlines searched their cargo logs and shook their heads when we inquired about the body of Juan Pedro. Someone finally directed us to a gate about 100 yards away from the terminal, where cargo was trucked in as it came off the airplanes.

Ambulance drivers and family members were gathered here, waiting in the night for their shipment. When the driver pulled up with his cargo, we all surrounded him with our inquiries. It was death at its most undignified moment.

But when those two bodies were unloaded, the airline employee checked his list. Neither was Juan Pedro.

As we waited for the cargo from the last flight of the night, it occurred to Jose and me for the first time: If this flight did bring Trujillo’s body, what were we going to do with it? It became obvious that no one else was there to meet it. We had a four-door sedan we had rented from a car agency at the airport, one that had had trouble maneuvering over the dirt roads in El Juamuchil. We weren’t exactly prepared to transport a body.

It didn’t arrive on the final flight, so just before midnight we drove away, dreading the scene the next morning, the sad face of Carmen Trujillo.

But when we drove into El Juamuchil and the family’s house the next morning, the body of Juan Pedro was lying in a huge white coffin in the middle of the room. Somehow, despite what the airlines had told us, it had arrived earlier and made its way home.

He was buried the next day, on a sweltering Sunday afternoon.

Most people in the town did not own cars, so they piled into the back of several pickup trucks for the short ride to the cemetery in the nearby town of La Barca. We had a car, too, so seven people crowded around Barrera and me, and we joined the caravan trailing behind the truck carrying Juan Pedro’s coffin.

The story of Juan Pedro touched many readers. One woman from Placentia wrote to say that the article “has revealed that there are so many little people who are heroes in life.”

A representative of Habitat for Humanity in San Diego, the group started by former President Jimmy Carter, has offered to investigate whether the organization can help the family finish the house that Juan Pedro was building for them with the money he earned from his job as a tire changer in Santa Ana.

The Rotary Club of Laguna Niguel wants to see if its chapters in Mexico can help. A group of nuns from Anaheim has sent $100 for his parents. Other readers have sent checks for $25 or $40 for Juan Pedro’s mother and father, saying their families were touched by this young man’s story.

What will always stay with me is the day we said goodbye to Juan Pedro’s family in El Juamuchil.

His mother and father told us they were honored that we had come to write about their son. They wanted to know when we would return to their town.

“Perhaps you could come at Christmastime,” his younger sister Beatrice asked. We said we would see.

“Oh, but I wish we had something to give you,” Juan Pedro’s mother said.

She asked her daughters to find the doilies they had crocheted as girls, and immediately Beatrice and Margarita, another sister, began rummaging through drawers of a dresser, pulling out one doilie after another, while Socorro, the oldest daughter, went to fetch a plastic bag to put them in.

My protests didn’t matter. How could I explain a Times’ policy of not accepting gifts from people we quote in stories?

“Nunca nos olvidaremos de ustedes,” she said to us. We will never forget you.