4 Who Deny Committing Murder Are Out of Prison but Don’t Feel Free : Justice: After 9 years, sentences are commuted. The law considers them criminals, so they can’t visit relatives in Mexico. But they may be deported.

They are free to walk the streets, to eat what they want, to sleep when they want. For four men who spent nine years in prison, this spring should be a time of sweet liberty.

But it is not. Instead, the four Mexicans whose murder convictions were commuted this year live in limbo because the law still considers them criminals.

They are free but cannot travel back and forth to see relatives in Mexico. They are free but now face deportation. They are free but, in their eyes, not free enough.

“Getting out is not enough,” Rogelio Arroyo, one of the four, said in broken English learned in prison. “We must prove to them that we are not the people that they think we are. . . . We are not done until our names are cleared.”

“We cannot relax,” said Isauro Sanchez, another of the group. “We feel worried, thinking about what is going to happen. You cannot make good plans. You don’t know your future.”

This is a story of family feuds and family ties, a saga of secrets and surprises that erupted in violence here nearly 10 years ago, when four Mexican men were killed and two others were injured.

Today, the four men, who proclaimed their innocence all along, are free but still feel that all the wrongs have not been righted. Commutations do not erase their felonies, so they are vulnerable to deportation. They want clean records to improve their chances of staying here with their families.

“How they’re going to live out the rest of their lives is totally still up in the air,” said Gary Adair, their attorney, who is considering whether to seek a gubernatorial pardon, which would remove the effects of conviction, or a new trial.

“It’s hanging like a sword,” said Margo De Ley, a Mexican-American activist who lobbied for their freedom. “You don’t know when it’s going to come down or whether you’re going to be able to move out from under it before it comes down.”

The men missed a chance to seek immigration amnesty in 1986 while in prison. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is giving them time to pursue legal options and will not arrest them pending deportation hearings. They have also been issued temporary work permits.

For now, the four are coming to grips with the bleak reality of wasted years and lost opportunities.

“You lose nine years of life behind the wall,” said Joaquin Varela, another of the group. “Who’s going to replace my life?”

Some of the four have not seen loved ones in Mexico in more than a decade. Their children grew up without them. Their criminal records make it hard to get jobs.

“Right now, we don’t have anything at all,” Sanchez said. “We don’t have even a place to live sometimes. We don’t have money . . . to buy food. We don’t have enough clothes. You think we are not in bad situation? We are.”

Still, they have come far, transforming themselves from prisoners to celebrities, convincing some important people that they did not commit murder. Their cries of innocence even attracted the attention of Mexico President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who met them when he visited Chicago in April.

This murder mystery began on Thanksgiving Day, 1981, with the shooting of six men. When police officers questioned the two survivors, one of the attackers was identified as a man named Gilberto Varela, a relative of the four eventually arrested.

Authorities went to Gilberto’s home and arrested Rogelio Arroyo, thinking he was Gilberto, who had fled to Mexico. Rogelio, a relative by marriage, lived in the house but insisted that he had not been at the shooting.

The police confusion over Rogelio’s identify was cleared up, but authorities still charged him with murder. Soon, three of Arroyo’s relatives by marriage were arrested--Ignacio Varela and his nephews, Joaquin Varela and Isauro Sanchez. None spoke English.

Police pieced together some facts: There apparently was a longstanding feud between the Varela and Sanchez families, originating in Guerrero, Mexico, a rugged area where disputes sometimes are resolved by gun and blood.

Three of the dead were members of the Sanchez family. All of the accused were Varelas or relatives.

The breakthrough seemed to come when Joaquin Varela said he had been at the scene that night--a confession that he later said he was tricked into making and tried to recant.

Then he changed his statement, saying he had only driven Gilberto Varela and another man to the shooting scene, parked up the street and saw nothing, Adair said. He implicated the other three arrested but later said he had been coerced.

“If you take a young kid like Joaquin, who’s terrified, who doesn’t know the system, who comes from Mexico . . . you see the kind of psychological situation he’d be in, very susceptible to influence,” said Andrea Lyon, who was his public defender and unsuccessfully fought to get the confession thrown out. “He always maintained he got pushed into the statement.”

“They abused us because we could not speak English, we didn’t know the legal system, the culture, we didn’t have the money to pay the lawyers,” Sanchez said. “You think that is justice?”

The judge in the case, Kenneth Gillis, now a high-ranking member of the state’s attorney’s office, disagrees, noting that the men had interpreters. He believes they are guilty but thinks Gilberto Varela was involved too.

During simultaneous trials--a jury for Joaquin Varela, the judge for the others--the star witness, a wounded survivor related to three of the dead, identified the four. Although he was drunk that night and his testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, Lyon said, “he was a very compelling witness.”

All four were sentenced to life in prison.

Still, they protested their innocence.

“There were days you just say, ‘Well, nothing’s going to happen, we’re just going to die in here,’ ” Arroyo said. “But most of the time we believed that we could be free because we didn’t commit the crime.”

After appeals failed, the Mexican consul general’s office in Chicago, which had been contacted by Arroyo’s mother, hired Adair in the mid-’80s.

He pored over records and worked with the families and an investigator, who found people who said they had heard the star witness say he knew he had the wrong men, but “someone had to pay.”

Meanwhile, one of Ignacio Varela’s relatives traveled to Mexico and obtained four statements--purportedly written by Gilberto Varela and three others--confessing to the shootings and exonerating the four inmates.

When his investigator told the star witness that, Adair said, the witness then said eight people were shooting--too many, according to the state police.

Then, last year, after a Chicago Magazine article, critical leads poured in, including a witness to the shootings, who feared coming forward before because she was an illegal alien.

At the same time, Ignacio Varela’s family continued its efforts in Mexico, and last spring, De Ley, who had taken up the cause, was phoned by a man identifying himself as Gilberto Varela.

“He said, ‘The four guys who are in jail in Illinois, they weren’t there. We did it,’ ” she recalled. “He made a list of who shot who. It was very confusing.”

Last fall, Adair and Alejandro Carrillo Castro, Mexican consul general in Chicago, traveled to Mexico and met Gilberto Varela, who had just been released from prison on a manslaughter conviction.

Carrillo said Varela told them the prisoners had not been present at the shooting and claimed he shot in self-defense. Also, he identified three others involved in the shooting. Their whereabouts are not known.

Carrillo, a lawyer who had interviewed the prisoners and studied the transcript, appealed to then-Gov. James R. Thompson, who ordered a state investigation.

Lt. Carlos Hevia of the Illinois State Police interviewed Gilberto Varela, who repeated his story.

“There’s no doubt in my mind these four people did not commit the murders,” Hevia said. “It was a totality of little pieces of what I got from police records, interviews, court records, the physical evidence.”

In January, Thompson commuted the sentences.