Back From the Dead : He Clung to Life for Days Along the Freeway; Now He Struggles to Recover and Find Work

Around his tiny hometown in Oaxaca, Mexico, Juan Francisco Camacho is known as the man who came back from the dead.

To this day, the locals talk about how the 21-year-old country boy survived being smashed by a speeding hit-and-run driver in May, 1990, while walking along a busy interstate north of the border.

They are amazed at how he clung stubbornly to life for four days and nights while marooned on the freeway median, nursing his shattered body while he shouted for help in Spanish, rattling tiny tree branches overhead in a wild attempt to alert one of the countless motorists who whizzed past without noticing him.

The story of Camacho’s gritty roadside vigil and rescue along Interstate 5 in Oceanside attracted worldwide attention, prompting hundreds of letters and get-well cards stuffed with cash and job offers from concerned citizens as far away as Alaska, Japan and Australia.

But until he showed up in his south-central Mexican village months after the accident, locals there did not get the whole story.

“They told me they thought I was dead,” the wiry, black-haired Camacho said, “that I couldn’t have lived through such a thing.”

But Camacho survived.

Now, back in San Diego after more than a year of recuperating in Mexico, he has found that his struggles as an undocumented laborer, still reeling from the effects of his near-fatal injuries, have in some ways been as trying as those untold hours he languished along the freeway.

Almost two years after the accident, he still cannot run because of lingering pain in his joints, and he thinks twice before crossing even a one-lane street, much less the wide expanse of freeway concrete. As the stream of calls and written expressions of concern have faded, Camacho still finds himself hopelessly unemployed.

Living in a small house in Linda Vista with 14 relatives, Camacho says the wincing pain he feels from his shattered pelvis, broken knee and shoulder keeps him from returning to the burdensome day labor routine in the San Diego County fields.

Moreover, his health and legal status have cost him one restaurant and carwash job after another, forcing him to wonder how he will care for his young girlfriend and 3-week-old daughter.

Recently, he and his young family have been forced to rely on the meager salary his mother earns as a maid.

“Life is hard,” he said recently during an interview at a restaurant near the place where his accident occurred. “I am glad that I’m still alive, that I survived those days, but it’s hard to be happy when you can’t find work and constantly have to worry where the money is going to come from.”

As he talks, Camacho’s 18-year-old girlfriend, Aurora Olea, clutches the couple’s infant daughter, Magali, and softly strokes her man’s arm. Angry at the news of her pregnancy, the girl’s parents forced Camacho to bring Aurora and her unborn child with him on his return to the United States.

After paying a documented woman from his village to smuggle Olea across the border, Camacho is feeling some very adult pressures to become a good provider, a competent father and, maybe someday soon, a devoted husband.

Unleashing a shy smile, the young man with a tattooed heart on his biceps--one without a name in the center--says he is not ready to settle down. Just then, the baby starts to cry. The smile drains quickly from his face.

His domestic life seems so distant now from Camacho’s more spontaneous existence in a makeshift encampment in rural Bonsal. After first crossing north over the border in 1986, he regularly walked 20 miles a day in search of work in the area’s vegetable fields and packing plants.

On May 5, 1990--the Cinco de Mayo holiday--Camacho walked straight into a freeway mishap that transformed a frustrating day in search of work into the most trying time of his life.

In Mexico, he says, locals commonly use congested highways as pedestrian thoroughfares, so it was not unusual for him to pace along on-ramps and shoulders in search of breaks in the traffic.

Camacho recalled that it was just turning dark as he left the last prospective job site in Oceanside, walked south along the freeway lanes, looking for a chance to cross, when he was hit from behind by a motorist who sped off. The impact propelled Camacho into the middle of the freeway and he rolled across the remaining two lanes to the safety of the median.

What happened over the next 96 hours has been relived time and again in Camacho’s mind. Although some details escape him, he says, others return to him in his sleep or when he holds his daughter. The memories will not leave him alone.

The next hours passed in a blur from the shock that began to set in from his shattered pelvis, broken limbs and internal injuries. He shivered at night and sweated through the day as his fever-induced temperature continued to soar.

By the third day, doctors say, Camacho inched closer to death. Still, he continued to rattle the branches of the thick oleander bushes above his head in hopes of signaling a passing driver. On the fourth day he was able to crawl back out onto the road shoulder to become more visible, and he was seen by a motorist.

As he recuperated at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, Camacho was flooded with cards and letters written in Spanish and English, offering jobs and more than $2,000 in cash and checks. He even got a note from ex-President Ronald Reagan.

Eventually, he tired of the limelight and sometimes covered his face when approached by an inquiring reporter or television camera. “To him, he did nothing that he considered heroic,” a friend said at the time.

“The life he had led in the migrant camps taught him how to be a survivor, how to find water, go without food. So surviving is nothing new to him.”

Dr. Edgar Gamboa, a trauma surgeon who treated Camacho, said he was amazed at the migrant worker’s stubborn battle to survive--as well as the public response.

He continues to receive an occasional letter for Camacho, and this Christmas received a card from a doctor in Madrid praising his efforts to keep a penniless migrant worker alive.

Gamboa attributed Camacho’s survival to a trauma system operated by several San Diego-area hospitals that provides life-and-death care for all patients--even indigent ones.

“People say that we’re wasting our money on this,” he said. “Like Juan Camacho, a lot of the people brought to hospitals have no money. But they’re human beings. They may be migrant workers and not your father or mother, but they deserve care.”

But even his doctor realizes the challenges that face Camacho.

“He still feels the pain of the residual arthritis in his joints,” Gamboa said. “The joints never heal back to 100%. It’s like a football injury and this man took quite a powerful hit.”

Camacho says he owes his survival and recovery to St. Sebastian, his patron saint, in whose honor he gave a party years ago to ask for protection before his first journey to the United States.

Looking back, Camacho does not feel that his guiding saint let him down by allowing him to be struck on the freeway. Rather, his faith helped him stay alive.

Although his future looms as a frowning question mark, Camacho says he has learned something from his dash across the freeway--and the episode of horror.

Now, he stops to enjoy the simple things in his life, like spending time with his mother or holding his doll-like daughter. He is becoming a more careful person, especially when crossing the street.

“When I cross,” he says, “I wait until there isn’t a car around for miles.”