Man Held in Death of Boy Crossing U.S. Border

A 21-year-old border-area resident is in custody in San Diego County Jail for allegedly killing a 12-year-old Mexican boy who was crossing into the United States to visit his family in Orange County.

Leonard P. Cuen allegedly shot Emilio Jiminez Bejines with a high-powered rifle from the balcony of his family’s home in San Ysidro Friday afternoon.

The youngster had been standing about 350 yards up a hill from Cuen’s home, accompanying three other family members as they stopped to catch their breath before continuing their sprint down the well-beaten path into the United States, police said.

After the boy was shot, his 22-year-old uncle tried to carry him back across the border into Mexico but gave up as U.S. Border Patrol agents converged on the scene, drawn by the commotion, police sdaid.

A San Diego sheriff’s helicopter flew overhead, police scoured the hillside and neighbors looked inside their garages to see if anyone was hiding.

A witness--another Latino who was on the hillside at the time of the shooting--said he saw two men standing on the second-floor balcony of a brown house, and that one of them had a gun.

San Diego police went to Cuen house, where neighbors say the family has lived for some 20 years, questioned Leoanrd Cuen and by evening had booked him on suspicion of murder. He is beingheld without bail.

The Cuens’ home sits next to one of the paths down the hillside that illegal aliens increasingly have used in recent years in entering the U.S. But police said there is no evidence the continual flow of aliens past the house was a factor in the shooting.

John Ferrari, who owns a home next to the Cuens, said gunfire from the house was not uncommon, and that it apparently resulted from target practice at bottles set up in the back yard.

Ferrari said that he heard gunfire coming from the vicinity of the Cuen house periodically on Friday, starting at about 10:45 a.m. Ferrari said he couldn’t see who was doing the firing because of thick shrubbery between house corrals on his property and the Cuen home. “But you could hear them firing off and on, all day Friday,” he said.

Border Patrol officials said they had not received previous reports of gunfire coming from any of the homes in the area, a rural, equestrian neighborhood between Interstate 5 and the ocean.

“We hear gunfire pretty regularly,” said Border Patrol spokesman Ted Swofford, “but we’re usually too far away to tell where it’s coming from. And there had been no citizen reports of shots coming from that particular house.

“Usually, our first assumption is that gunfire comes from the border bandits.”

The dead boy’s parents live in the Orange County community of Stanton. His mother, Ana Maria Jimenez Bejines, said Monday that the boy’s father is the only family member in the U.S. legally.

The boy, who had been staying in Mexico with relatives, was crossing the border Friday to visit them, his mother said. He had written a poem to her on Mother’s Day and, she said with a sob, “he wanted to bring it to me personally.”