Hope for a Cure Led to Tragedy for 1 Family : Faith: Word about a man with special talents filtered to many from a Tijuana tortilla shop. Relatives of those who died in a makeshift chapel are trying to understand the man’s attraction and cope with funeral arrangements.

Esequiel Sarabia says it was his younger sister, 15-year-old Maribel, who informed him of the special talents of the man known as Don Federico.

“She was losing her hair, and the man at the tortilla shop said that Don Federico could help her,” Sarabia remembered Friday as he walked the dirt streets of Colonia Mariano Matamoros, the sprawling neighborhood on the city’s periphery where his family lives.

Thus began a relationship that would lead to catastrophe for the Sarabia family: six family members were found dead or injured in the four-room house where Federico Padres Mexia practiced his ceremonies.

Authorities say 12 people died and five were injured this week during a religious rite at Mexia’s makeshift chapel. Officials said carbon monoxide poisoning from a butane lantern was the cause of death.

Among the dead are Sarabia’s sisters, Maribel, 15, and Blanca, 20, and his mother, Maria Dora Hernandez, 38. Meanwhile, his father, Juan Jose Sarabia, 42, is one of three victims who remain in comas at a Tijuana hospital.

“We were six brothers and sisters; now we are four,” Sarabia, who is 18, said.

Among those in the hospital is Alfredo Osuna Hernandez, 22, Sarabia’s brother-in-law and the husband of Blanca. The couple’s 8-month-old daughter, Ana Karen, is also recuperating.

“Alfredo doesn’t know that his wife is dead,” Sarabia said.

Sarabia’s sister, Maribel, thought that she would receive or be granted special powers during the prayer sessions.

“She thought Jesus would descend like a star to her, and she would be able to make the blind see, to make invalids walk,” Sarabia recalled. “I didn’t believe in it.”

Throughout the Mariano Matamoros community--a free-form, expanding neighborhood of perhaps 15,000 people, mostly poor migrants from the Mexican interior--residents were speaking in hushed tones of the tragedy.

Many who didn’t know Mexia assumed that he was one of the many U.S. evangelicals who long have been proselytizing in the area, creating considerable resentment.

“How barbarous this was. How senseless,” said Francisco Pialva, who had come to the Tortilleria La Costena to buy some tortillas, only to learn that the shop was closed. “No one can understand this.”

The tortilla shop’s proprietor, Rafael Corchado Meraz, 37, had helped spread the word of Mexia’s ceremonies to Maribel Sarabia and throughout the neighborhood. People could be cured of the bad luck that kept them unemployed, he told them.

On Thursday, the tortilla maker was among the dead from the ill-fated prayer meeting.

He had led many customers to visit the enigmatic figure.

“They said he had religious powers; that he cured people,” said Felipe Osuna Hernandez, 24, older brother of Alfredo Osuna Hernandez, who is conscious and expected to recover.

But Felipe, too, had reason to mourn: he lost his wife, Margarita Ramos Saucedo, 20.

“He looked for people who he thought could see Christ,” Felipe Osuna Hernandez said as he left the city morgue.

On Monday, he recalled, he had visited Mexia out of curiosity. He had accompanied a friend who was complaining of stomach pain.

“He touched her and told her she had an ulcer,” Osuna Hernandez recalled.

Many of the relatives who made the trek to the morgue to identify loved ones expressed preoccupation with meeting wake and funeral costs.

Outside the morgue, members of the Osuna and the Sarabia families sat by a relative’s car. The families reside only a few feet from each other in cinder-block houses in the Mariano Matamoros neighborhood.

“They thought that the Virgin was going to descend,” said Sergio Hernandez Peraza, 39, who lost his sister and two nieces in the incident. The worshipers, he noted, had met Dec. 12, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patroness of Mexico and Latin America.

“The Virgin didn’t come,” he added, “instead it was the devil that descended.”