$275,000 for Family of Boy Shot Dead at Border : Settlement: Company that insured house used by gunman will pay relatives of 12-year-old Mexican killed while making trek north.

The family of a young Mexican boy who was shot and killed while illegally crossing the border agreed to a $275,000 out-of-court settlement from the insurance company of the family from whose house the fatal shot was fired.

Emilio Jimenez Bejinez, 12, was killed on the afternoon of May 18, 1990, by a single shot to the head from a rifle fired from the balcony of a house on Monument Road in San Ysidro. Dwight Ray Pannel, 24, was charged with the killing.

Although Pannel pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and received a two-year prison sentence, he has never acknowledged firing the shot that killed the youth. On the day of the shooting, police said, Pannel and an accomplice, Leonard Paul Cuen, 23, had spent the day drinking beer and using drugs at Cuen’s home.

An affidavit filed in the case said that Pannel, Cuen and a third man fired shots from the balcony on the afternoon of the killing.

A witness identified as Julie Hannah told investigators that she heard Pannel say, “Let’s shoot some aliens” before he fired into a hillside where undocumented border-crossers had gathered.

San Diego attorney Marco Lopez, who represented the victim’s family, said the settlement was reached Monday with Prudential Insurance Co., which insured the home owned by Cuen’s parents, Edward and Elizabeth Cuen.

The elder Cuens could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The house, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the international border and northwest of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, sits along a well-beaten path used by aliens on their trek north.

According to police, Pannel and two other unidentified accomplices had robbed and beaten two illegal immigrants for “beer money” a few hours before the slaying. The assailants hit one victim on the head with a baseball bat, police said. Pannel and the two men were never prosecuted.

On the day of the shooting, Emilio Jimenez; his sister, Raquel, now 12; brother, Ernesto, now 15, and their uncle Emilio Bejinez Gomez had crossed the border with other aliens and were en route to Orange County, where the children’s parents live.

The three children and their uncle had started their journey north from the Mexican state of Jalisco. The children’s mother, Ana Maria Jimenez, had not seen them in two years. She was reunited with the younger Emilio in an Orange County mortuary four days after his death.

Attorney Lopez said that although Leonard Cuen did not act with malicious intent in the shooting, he “did provide the rifle that was used to shoot Emilio. Our case against Cuen and his parents was not for intentional misconduct. We had to tailor it to a negligence action, because Leonard Cuen was negligent in his parents’ absence.”

Police arrested Cuen as a suspect on the day of the shooting. However, prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to charge him with murder.

Instead, they charged him with using a bow and arrow to rob two groups of undocumented aliens in March, 1990, but he was never prosecuted.

Lopez credited Enrique Loaeza, the Mexican consul general in San Diego, for working closely with San Diego police to assure that Pannel was brought to justice.