Mother Learns Her Boy Died Crossing I-5

Mexican authorities finally succeeded Thursday in contacting the family of an 8-year-old undocumented Mexican boy struck by a car and killed last week along Interstate 5 in North San Diego County, a Mexican official said.

The disconsolate mother of the dead boy indicated the family is unable to afford a burial.

The boy’s remains may be cremated in San Diego today, once Mexican authorities help the family obtain about $350 needed for the procedure, said Virginia Arteaga, an officer with the citizen’s protection division of the Mexican consulate in San Diego.

After attempting to reach the dead boy’s family for a week, Arteaga said she finally succeeded Thursday in speaking by telephone with the mother, Angelica Marin Noyola, a former resident of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.

“She is very distressed,” said Arteaga, noting that the mother broke up and cried on the telephone.

She and her remaining five children are staying with a sister in Santa Ana, Arteaga said. They were en route to the Orange County community when the accident occurred, she said. The dead boy’s father, who is separated from the mother, remains in Mexico, Arteaga said.

The mother has indicated that she could raise no more than $100 for the disposition of her son’s remains, the consular official said.

The boy’s death--coupled with the death of a teen-age pedestrian later the same day--prompted renewed calls for bolstered safety measures to reduce the hazard to undocumented pedestrians who regularly seek to cross the busy San Diego-area freeways on foot.

Since 1987, at least 116 pedestrians thought to have been undocumented immigrants have been struck and killed on area roadways, including 26 during 1990.

The California Department of Transportation, stung by criticism that it is not doing enough to reduce the carnage, said last week that it is considering a number of “radical” responses, including the reduction of speed limits in the two principal problem areas--in the immediate border zone next to Tijuana and near the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint north of Oceanside.

The dead boy, Constantino Loreto Marin, has five surviving siblings, ranging in age from a 14-year-old sister to a 6-year-old brother.

The boy, accompanied by his mother and her other children, was hit by a southbound car shortly after midnight Aug. 8 on I-5 about 1 1/2-miles north of the U.S. immigration checkpoint in northern San Diego County. He was the last in line among a group that was crossing the freeway, authorities said. He died at the scene.

The Marin family, like hundreds of thousands of others each year, had entered the country illegally and were planning to begin a new life in the north. Many who illegally cross the border attempt to evade detection by hiking around the checkpoint, a hazardous process that often requires pedestrians to make two trips across eight lanes of traffic.

On the same day the 8-year-old was killed, a car struck and killed a teen-age Latino male along a nearby stretch of the freeway not far from the checkpoint. He remains unidentified in the county morgue in San Diego.

Near the I-5 immigration checkpoint, 33 pedestrians believed to have been illegal immigrants have been killed since 1987, including 10 this year. Near the border--where Interstates 5 and 805 and California 905 converge, forming an imposing barrier to the steady stream of humanity entering from the south--there have been 83 such deaths since 1987, 16 this year.