Tangled Tale of Tussle Highlights Border Tension : Probe: A 15-year-old Mexican boy charged with attacking a Border Patrol officer says the officer beat him. Mexican officials want an explanation.

Like the other Mexicans who swarm each night across the Tijuana River levee into the United States, 15-year-old ManuelQ Quezada de la Torre knew the trip north was not without risk.

At the levee, the direction to Los Angeles and points beyond is obvious. The exact path is not. To reach safety means first traversing the vast forbidden fields, menacing canyons and serpentine highways south of San Diego. It means evading ruthless smugglers and drug-runners.

These were the dangers of the night that the 5-foot-1, 98-pound Quezada had counted on. What he didn’t expect was an encounter with the U.S. Border Patrol and a scuffle that would leave him with an injured head, mark him as an accused felon facing as much as three years behind bars, and make him the focus of an investigation of Border Patrol practices.

The rapid-fire sequence of events after the teen-ager reached a wall near a San Ysidro cul-de-sac Oct. 21 also illustrates the scenes played out almost every night near the border. And it highlights the central question in cases where a police officer uses force in an arrest: Who is telling the truth?

The teen-ager’s version of events is so at odds with the story offered by the Border Patrol that the two cannot be reconciled. The Border Patrol alleges that the boy punched an agent. The boy said that he was beaten by the agent and, later, threatened by other agents.

In a Nov. 15 letter to U.S. authorities, officials at the Mexican consulate in San Diego formally asked for an investigation.

“We are worried about this kind of incident” because reports by Mexican migrants of Border Patrol abuse are not unusual, consular spokesman Miguel Escobar said. He said he could not provide figures on the frequency of those reports.

Escobar stressed that Mexican diplomats in San Diego were not looking to disrupt what he called a sincere spirit of cooperation with U.S. authorities. But, he said, “We have made inquiries with the proper authorities demanding an explanation. And now we are waiting for an answer.”

Prosecution documents filed in federal court said the teen-ager attacked Border Patrol Agent Ferrel F. Fisher, punching him in the mouth. According to the Border Patrol’s incident report: “Agent identified himself as a Border Patrol Agent, at which time (Quezada) struck the agent in the mouth with a closed fist.”

In response, the documents said, Fisher pushed Quezada, and the teen-ager fell back against a 6-foot wall at the west end of Arbodar Street in San Ysidro, then onto the ground, splitting his head open.

The agent ended up with two stitches. The teen-ager’s gash was closed with three staples, a quick, sterile and increasingly common way to bind wounds, doctors said.

In an interview, Quezada said he hit no one. He said he was the one who was attacked.

Quezada said he was on his way from Tepetongo, a small town in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, to visit relatives in Los Angeles. “I was not going to learn any more in Tepetongo,” he said, adding that he wants to learn mathematics so he can become a professor.

After leaving the levee, he and a guide--a coyote , he said, the Spanish term that means “paid guide” to immigrants or “migrant smuggler” to U.S. authorities--came to the wall. The time was nearly 1 a.m., he said.

As they climbed over the wall, they saw Border Patrol agents. Scrambling back over it, they encountered Fisher, Quezada said. They jumped to the ground, and while coming down, the guide accidentally kicked the agent in the mouth, Quezada said.

The guide fled, Quezada said, leaving him alone with the injured agent, who purportedly whipped him on the head with a flashlight while he lay on the ground screaming for help.

“I was scared when I was walking across (the border). Of many things,” Quezada said in a recent interview, speaking softly in Spanish and rarely looking up, his hands holding tightly to the arms of a soft chair. A translator repeated his sentences in English while an uncle, Fernando Quezada, 24, a hospital janitor who lives in El Monte, checked for accuracy.

“But la migra ,” Quezada said, using Spanish slang for the Border Patrol and U.S. immigration authorities, “I was scared only that if they would get us, they would send us back. I never thought I would be beaten up.”

Nor did he think, as he alleges, that he would be interrogated and threatened. After a trip to Scripps Memorial Hospital in Chula Vista, where his head was stapled, he was returned to a Border Patrol office. He said he did not know which one.

With his head pounding and his jacket soaked with blood, Quezada said, he was told by agents that if he did not plead guilty to punching Fisher, they would “beat me until I was dead, or put me in a dark room and teach me manners.”

“I kept telling them I did not hit the officer,” the teen-ager said.

“How could I hit him with my fist?” he asked. “I would have to jump up to do it.”

Court documents do not indicate when Quezada was questioned. At some point, the boy was advised of his legal rights and “asked biographical data only,” the documents said.

The agent in charge of the case is Charles Vinson, according to the court papers.

Neither Vinson nor Fisher could be reached for comment. Calls to the Imperial Beach office, where both agents are based, and to Border Patrol officials elsewhere in San Diego were referred to agency spokesman Steve Kean.

The teen-ager’s story “sounds pretty bizarre to me,” Kean said. “I highly doubt any such thing occurred.”

Kean said he could not, however, comment further on the case, not even to disclose Fisher’s height and weight, because there was a criminal case pending.

“I want to point out that agents are subjected to attacks and assaults down here on a frequent basis,” Kean said. “They do need to protect and defend themselves.”

The Border Patrol’s San Diego office, which covers 66 miles of the international boundary in San Diego and Imperial counties, reported 132 assaults on agents in fiscal 1991, which ended Sept. 30, he said. Agents made 540,000 arrests last fiscal year for illegal immigration, he said.

A few hours after the scuffle, U.S. prosecutors filed felony charges against Quezada, alleging that he assaulted a federal officer. If convicted, he could be sentenced to three years, probably in San Diego Juvenile Hall. Prosecutors also filed a lesser illegal entry charge.

The case is set for a Jan. 14 trial before U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. Because it involves a minor, the trial would be before Thompson alone, with no jury. Unlike state court, there is no separate juvenile court in the federal system.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Jay Alvarez, who will prosecute the case, declined to comment.

Mary Maguire, a deputy public defender representing Quezada, said in an interview that she was concerned about “outrageous conduct by the Border Patrol,” and said the case was “just indicative of the problem.”

Maguire also noted that the San Diego federal court holds the dubious honor of having the nation’s highest per-judge criminal caseload, mostly from so-called “border busts,” meaning low-level drug and immigration arrests at the border.

“I think it is appalling that the U.S. attorney’s office has chosen to pursue this case, seeing as all the dockets in this court are full,” Maguire said. “They’ve chosen to prosecute a 15-year-old who suffered severe injuries to his head?”

The day after the fight, after spending a night at Juvenile Hall in San Diego, the teen-ager was released to the custody of his uncle, Fernando Quezada, until the trial. The uncle has resident alien status, meaning he holds a “green card” enabling him to live legally in the United States.

Until the criminal case is resolved, Manuel Quezada has INS permission to remain in the country with his uncle, according to court records.

The teen-ager has been placed in a bilingual 10th-grade class at Arroyo High School in El Monte. But one day a couple of weeks ago, the school nurse, Myrtle Watson, sent home a written report that, apparently out of the blue, Quezada “started breathing hard and then fell over at his desk, hitting his head on the desk.”

After being unconscious for a few seconds, he recovered but shook so hard that he broke the pens and pencils he was gripping in his right hand, the nurse said in the note.

Watson said she did not know whether the incident was related to Quezada’s head wound.

“It could be,” she said. “I’m not saying it is. He had stitches in his head. And any kind of trauma to the head could cause things like that. It’s something that would be hard to prove one way or another, not knowing the child beforehand.”

A few weeks before Manuel Quezada saw the school nurse, Fernando Quezada said, his nephew was at a neighborhood convenience store when he saw a police car with its lights flashing and siren blasting. Frightened, he ran all the way home, where he shook for an hour, biting his nails and unable to speak, Fernando Quezada said.

Speaking through the interpreter, Manuel Quezada de la Torre said last week that, despite the scuffle, he is glad he made it to the United States. “I still like it,” he said. “I’m close to my family.”

But, he said, he is “nervous and scared” about being accused in a criminal case in a strange country--and, especially, about the possibility of prison.

“I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “When I think about it, I’m very, very scared.”