Checkpoint Death Toll Grows : Immigration: Passions are ignited as illegal aliens playing a cat-and-mouse game with INS agents continue to be run down by freeway traffic at San Clemente inspection stop.

After spending the day at Disneyland with her son and daughter, Sharon Fisk was weary but alert as she steered her car south on Interstate 5 toward San Diego.

It was to be a long and routine drive that Tuesday night earlier this month. But just a few minutes past San Clemente, the tedium quickly turned ugly. Out of the darkness, an 8-year-old boy dashed in front of Fisk’s car, and in minutes he was dead.

“I saw nothing until I hit the person,” a distraught Fisk said last week from her home in Mesa, Ariz. “I didn’t see a face or anything. It’s bad enough that I hit someone, let alone that it was an 8-year-old child, but then the mother had to see it too.”

The boy, Constantino Loreto Marin, had darted from the center divider along with his mother and a handful of others, all illegal aliens from Mexico. Constantino and his mother were on their way to visit her sister in Santa Ana.

A few minutes past midnight Aug. 8, the boy became the ninth person to die this year trying to cross the freeway to sneak past the Border Patrol’s checkpoint just southeast of San Clemente.

Less than 24 hours later, a teen-ager--also believed to be an undocumented alien--was struck and killed by another vehicle as he too tried to dodge through the heavy freeway traffic in the dark.

That so many people have met with such a horrifying death as they play a cat-and-mouse game with federal agents this far north of the U.S.-Mexican border has ignited the passions and concern of Orange County officials, human rights groups and others.

The checkpoint is in San Diego County, but Orange County officials say the effect spills over to their turf. San Clemente is the city closest to the checkpoint, so its fire paramedics handle emergency calls from the checkpoint area. And chases involving Border Patrol agents and suspected coyotes-- or immigrant smugglers--come squealing north, often ending in fatal crashes in San Clemente.

“Many of the people dying,” said Robin Blackwell, coordinator of the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, “are long-term residents of Orange County, or they are bound for Orange County, or they have family in Orange County.

“It’s hard to ignore when you have people in your own community dying in such a dramatic way. Some of the drivers hitting them are from Orange County. It’s hard not to feel the impact of that. If it touches your life, you pay more and more attention.”

Large numbers of Latino immigrants have been lured to the county by a booming job market and the large Latino pockets in Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fullerton.

So treacherous is this stretch of the freeway that it has been dubbed Slaughter Alley, said Jack Stubbs, emergency planner for the San Clemente Fire Department.

“For as long as I can remember, for reasons maybe having to do with the checkpoint or maybe not, that’s been a particularly dangerous stretch of highway,” he said.

For the last few years, the city’s top officials have also been calling for action because of the number of chases by the Border Patrol that end in tragedy. In 1987, one pursuit from San Clemente to Anaheim involving illegal aliens ended in a crash that killed a baby and injured 18 others.

San Clemente Mayor Candace Haggard said: “It’s never been explained to me in any terms that make sense why they have a border checkpoint so far north. We’re 60 or 70 miles from the border. It just doesn’t make sense.”

President Bush’s proposed budget includes $10 million to expand and move the checkpoint 5 miles closer to San Diego. The design calls for traffic to be diverted off the freeway for drug and document checks. Officials say such an expanded checkpoint would go a long way toward preventing the pedestrian deaths.

The money has not yet been approved by Congress. “It’s all tied up in budgetary matters now,” Haggard said.

Last month, in a five-hour sweep, Border Patrol agents aided by helicopters arrested 920 suspected undocumented aliens and three suspected smugglers in an action that tied up northbound I-5 traffic for five hours.

In a similar sweep in late July, 534 people were apprehended. But that sweep was cut short when a truck struck and killed a couple from Mexico on the freeway. He was a strawberry-picker in Anaheim, and his wife was making her first trip here to visit her children.

Immigration officials say the large numbers of immigrants picked up in the random, unannounced sweeps reflect the need for greater intervention to stem the flow of illegal aliens north.

And Gustavo de la Vina, chief agent of the San Diego Border Patrol sector, which oversees the checkpoint, noted that this is not the only station so far from the border. The Border Patrol has one on Interstate 15 near Fallbrook in northern San Diego County, and in El Paso, the second-biggest immigrant crossing point along the border, there are seven such inland stations, he said.

De la Vina said the fault lies with the coyotes, not the checkpoint.

“When deaths like this happen, it’s very, very unnerving for us, and we feel real bad about that occurring,” he said. “But the smuggler is the one we’re concentrating on, and we’re going to take them down. A checkpoint is a must for our operation.

“These smugglers are the scum of the earth,” De la Vina said. “They’ll stop their vehicles on that freeway and tell the people to bail out, to run across toward the ocean side and tell them that they’ll pick them up north of the checkpoint.

“You’re talking about women and kids and old people. They’re disoriented. They’re not familiar with the traffic patterns and with the high speeds on these expressways. That’s why you have this type of tragedy.”

Investigators at Cal State Fullerton, researching the issue for Caltrans, have found that some immigrants think that drivers can see them clearly as they dart across the freeway.

Motorists such as Fisk, on the other hand, say they do not see the pedestrians until the very last second, if at all. Most are shocked at the prospect of seeing people crossing such a busy and well-traveled freeway.

“There’s a double bind here,” said Dr. Robert Emry, associate dean of Cal State Fullerton’s communications department, who is directing the study. “The first time drivers see people on the freeway here, they don’t believe it. People are not supposed to be on the freeways. It’s a contradiction in terms.

“But the other part is taking into consideration the culture and the background of the person coming down the road. He or she may be from an area where a person has as much right to be on that road, to share that space. . . . They feel the motorists see them, and that they don’t slow down because they don’t care about the person.”

The final report to Caltrans is due in November, Emry said, but so far investigators have several suggestions, including putting up a more imposing barrier to keep pedestrians off the freeway. But they note that Caltrans would have to consider the political and social implications of building such a wall.

Other recommendations could be put into place quickly, the researchers said. They include starting an educational program among immigrants on this side of the border and in Mexico about the dangers of crossing the freeway.

Also, they would like to produce a video that would feature an immigrant who was hit by a car in San Diego County in May and lived several days on the side of the road before he got help. The video, Emry said, could be played at the patrol’s holding area, where apprehended undocumented aliens are held while their cases are processed.

They also suggest a mural in Mexico that would depict the story of freeway deaths or posters at bus stations.

Evelyn Colon-Becktell, chairwoman of the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said researchers have not talked with anyone from her organization, which is the umbrella group of agencies and services for immigrants in this county.

“Our input is lacking in that report,” she said.

She said that while many people would like to see the checkpoint removed, few see that as a realistic goal.

“You have to concentrate on a massive education program, both for the immigrants and the motorists going by there,” Colon-Becktell said.

“But even then, how much can you ask drivers to slow down without causing more danger?” she added. “People are already frustrated at crossing the border because of all the waiting, but something is going to have to be done if we’re going to continue to have that checkpoint there.”

Near the Interstate checkpoint, 33 pedestrians believed to have been illegal aliens have been killed since 1987, including the 10 this year. In terms of danger, the checkpoint rivals areas farther south, closer to the U.S.-Mexico border, where 83 pedestrians have been killed since 1987 near the area where Interstates 5 and 805 and California 905 converge.

That more immigrants are not killed trying to cross the freeway near San Clemente is what is amazing, say those who have been there.

“It is very tragic and very difficult,” said a man named Frank who was at the rest stop just southeast of the checkpoint one day last week. “I was once an illegal myself, so I know the danger. But what can you do? You want to come here only to improve your life, so sometimes you take chances.”

But when they don’t make it across, it means anguish not only for the family of those who died, but also for the drivers who hit them.

“I’m a victim too,” said Fisk of Arizona. “I know they were coming here to have a better life, but I will have to live with this the rest of my life too.”