Worshipers Sought Cures in House Where 12 Died

Esequiel Sarabia said 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, 18, remembered Friday as he walked the dirt streets of Colonia Mariano Matamoros, the sprawling neighborhood on the city periphery where his family lives.

Thus began a relationship that would lead to catastrophe for the Sarabia family: Six family members either died or became sick in the two-room house where Federico Padres Mexia practiced his ceremonies.

Authorities say 12 people died and five became ill this week during a religious rite at Mexia’s makeshift chapel. Officials suspect a leaky gas lamp was the culprit.

Among the dead are Sarabia’s sisters, Maribel, Blanca, 20; his mother, Maria Dora Hernandez, 38. 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 said.

In addition, among those hospitalized 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.

“How barbarous this was. How senseless,” said Francisco Pialva, as he stood outside the closed Tortilleria La Costena, a neighborhood tortilla shop and gathering place. “No one can understand this.”

The 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 Friday, the tortilla maker was among the dead from the ill-fated prayer meeting.

He had led many customers, including Maribel Sarabia, to visit the enigmatic figure.

“They said he (Mexia) 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 accompanied a friend who complained of a stomach pain.

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

Many of the relatives who also 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 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 on 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.”