Nobody Knows His Name

They stood around a white Dodge van on a quiet street called Filmore, talking about a hard-working man who’d been shot to death on a smoggy afternoon in L.A.

“Why’d he shoot us?” Filmon Hierro was saying, meaning the guy who’d held the gun. Hierro was shot too. “We didn’t know him, he didn’t know us. Why’d he do it?”

“He was crazy,” Romualdo Campos said. “That’s the only reason. Nothing else makes sense.”

There were maybe a dozen men around the van. Most of them just listened, a few offered comments. All mourned the death of a friend.

His name was Ramiro Mejia. That’s not a name you’ve likely heard before and it’s not a name you’re likely to hear again.

The story of his death didn’t make the paper and it didn’t make the 11 o’clock news. Ramiro Mejia died pretty much as he’d lived. Anonymously.

The facts are simple. Mejia, 36, and Hierro, 25, had parked the white van on Turquoise Street a few miles away from where they lived in a rented house on Filmore.

They were preparing to load a hand cart with fresh fruit to sell door to door. It was the same street they’d worked one day a week for the last five months, and during a lot of other summers before this one.

Hierro was at the wheel of the van. Mejia stood outside on the passenger side, looking in.

Witnesses said a guy walked out of his porch across the street, carrying a rifle. There was a single shot. Mejia was hit in the head and died almost instantly. Hierro caught the same bullet in his left arm.

Then the man went back into his house. He never said a word.

“Find out why it happened,” Hierro said to me, his wounded arm in a cast. “Find out why the guy hated us. We’re not gang, man. We’re vendors!”

He was talking about Carlos Gonzalez, 35, who has been arrested for investigation of murder. A .30-caliber rifle was recovered from his house.

Gonzalez calls the shooting an accident. What he was doing with a loaded rifle on the porch in the first place hasn’t been made clear. Neighbors say he’s unemployed and never goes anywhere.

“We don’t know that it was an accident,” Detective William Guerrero said. “But if it was, it’s another example of the kind of thing that happens when you bring a gun on the street.

“A bullet that’s been fired has got to go somewhere. This time it went into the head of a guy just trying to make a living.”

That’s the thing of it. You can’t kiss this off as another gang blow-out. Nor was it a love triangle, a feud or a clash of macho egos.

Mejia was about as straight a guy as you’d want to meet. He had a wife, Rosa, and five children. They live in the little town of San Miguel, southeast of Mexico City, where he, himself, lived seven months a year.

The rest of the time was spent in L.A. Mejia and Hierro had come here every summer for almost 10 years to sell fruit on the Eastside.

They would hit the produce market at 4 in the morning every day but Sunday to buy the fruit they’d peddle that same day along well-defined routes.

“It was good fruit,” Hierro said proudly. “We never cheated nobody.”

They’d each make maybe $25 a day profit. Most of it went to their families in Mexico. Hierro has a wife and three children, also in San Miguel.

Life in L.A. wasn’t all work. Sometimes the two would sit on the front porch in the twilight heat and drink a beer. Mejia would play the guitar and sing. Romualdo Campos would come to listen.

Campos went to school with Mejia in San Miguel. They were lifelong friends. “There was no one better,” he said. “He never made trouble.”

“We were going home next Tuesday,” Hierro said. “Ramiro called his wife Sunday. He was glad the summer was over. He wanted to see his family.” He shook his head. “Now I will be taking him home in a casket.”

Much of the money the men earned will be spent for the coffin, for shipping the dead man home, and for the funeral. Despite the hard labor of summer, little will remain for the winter.

Questions were asked that afternoon on Filmore. Why was the shot fired? Why did an inoffensive fruit vendor have to die? Why was there not even a story in the paper? Does anyone really care?

That troubles them most. Does anyone care?

We should. Ramiro Mejia’s death crosses ethnic lines. He was a husband and a father, a simple man who longed for a better life and was willing to work to achieve it.

He was you and he was me, and his death should not go unsung.