Arrest Made in Slaying of Migrant : Crime: Police say a San Ysidro man chased down the border-crossers and fired because he was angry that they had run through his back yard.

San Diego police arrested a 19-year-old man Tuesday, accusing him of gunning down an illegal immigrant in a cul-de-sac near the border after the victim and four companions ran through the man’s back yard.

Police described the slaying as a hate crime. It occurred in a residential neighborhood where illegal immigrants run through streets and yards every night, often with U.S. Border Patrol vehicles and helicopters in pursuit. It is a border battleground that on Monday morning became a killing ground.

The suspect, Harold Ray Bassham, apparently became angry after four illegal immigrants and a smuggler ran through the fenced back yard of his house in the 3500 block of Wardlow Avenue in San Ysidro shortly before 8 a.m., according to police and others. The five had crossed the border about a mile south at the Tijuana River levee, police said.

Police said Bassham jumped in his car and pursued the group around a corner onto Valentino Street, which dead-ends at a wall next to Interstate 5. As the five people were climbing over the wall onto the freeway, a route commonly used by illegal immigrants walking north, Bassham jumped out of the car and fired four shots at them from a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, police said.

One shot hit Humberto Reyes Miranda, a 23-year-old from the Mexico City area, in the chest, police said. Reyes was the last of the five to climb the wall, and three of the group fled as Reyes fell, fatally wounded, onto the freeway, police said.

A friend of Reyes stayed with him, tried to call authorities from a freeway call box and finally flagged down a Border Patrol car passing on the freeway, police said.

Acting on descriptions provided by Reyes’ friend and other witnesses, police arrested Bassham on Tuesday morning after spotting his car in the neighborhood, Lt. John Welter said. Bassham, who is unemployed and lives with his mother and stepfather, was being held at County Jail downtown on suspicion of murder, Welter said.

“In our opinion, the suspect shot the victim because he was an alien crossing his property,” Welter said. “Part of his motivation appears to be (Reyes’) race and national origin.”

The incident bears some similarities to a shooting in 1990 in which a laborer firing a high-powered rifle from a balcony in Imperial Beach killed a 12-year-old boy who had just crossed the border. Dwight Ray Pannel pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the case, which activists in Mexico and the United States described as a classic example of abuse against illegal immigrants.

In another case in which migrants were targeted, an 18-year-old Mira Mesa man with an admitted dislike of Mexicans was sentenced to 50 years in state prison for shooting to death two migrant workers in Rancho Penasquitos in 1988.

Miguel Escobar, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, said Tuesday that the consulate “condemns these types of aggressions against undocumented workers, who come here only looking for work.”

Welter said Reyes and his companions did not appear to have done anything to Bassham other than cross his property.

“There’s no evidence that they committed any kind of crime other than entering the country illegally,” he said.

Bassham’s father is Anglo and his mother, Pilnan Beard, is Korean. Interviewed Tuesday at her pleasant house around the corner from the shooting scene, Beard said she was shocked that her son had been arrested and did not believe he was capable of such a crime.

She said her son, a high school dropout who she said served time in a juvenile institution in 1987 for stealing a gun, has friends of all ethnic groups.

But Beard said her son had complained before about the illegal immigrants climbing the wooden fence and running through the back yard; most residents of the area have dogs and barred windows because of the constant nightly traffic of pursuers and pursued.

“They run through here all the time,” Beard said. “They never bother anybody. They are too busy running.”

On Monday morning, Beard said, she heard her dog barking--usually a sign that migrants are crossing the property and those of her neighbors--and her son yelling from the house.

“I heard my son yell, ‘Don’t try to pass through my house!’ ” she said. Then, she said, she heard the garage door open and assumed her son was leaving. She said she heard nothing more about the incident until her son called Tuesday afternoon to say he was under arrest.

A neighbor who witnessed the shooting said he heard shots and looked out his window in time to see a gunman standing by a car in the cul-de-sac on Valentino Street, firing toward the freeway.

The witness did not see the migrants, who police say were clambering over the freeway wall about 100 feet away. But he said he saw the gunman, whom he described as a young white or Latino man, get back into a dark-colored, Japanese-model car and drive away.

Another neighbor, postal worker Cuahtemoc Roybal, said he saw police questioning victim Reyes’ companion, a man in his early 20s, at the shooting scene shortly afterward.

“He was sitting there, crying from the shock,” Roybal said. “My wife gave him a soda to drink.”

The migrant accompanying Reyes, whom police declined to identify, is being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown for illegally entering the country, Welter said. He will probably be held as a witness to the homicide, Welter said.

Reyes and the other man are from Teloyucan, a small community outside Mexico City, but their destination was unknown, police said.

Bassham and his family moved in December to the subdivision just west of Dairy Mart Road. The neighborhood is about a mile north of the border and abuts the Tijuana River County Open Space Reserve immediately to the south. The houses and apartment complexes provide shelter from detection for illegal immigrants after they cross the open space.

The family previously lived in Stockton for three years, moving there from San Diego, said Tom Beard, Bassham’s stepfather. A Navy man, Beard appeared quiet and stunned by the incident.

“We didn’t know he had a gun,” Beard said. “If we knew he had a gun, we would have made him get rid of it.”

Beard’s wife said she had been urging her son to resume his schooling.

“I was pushing him to go to school or get a job,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I didn’t want him getting into trouble.”

Police suspected that Reyes’ killer was from the immediate area because of the strange, seemingly random nature of the shooting, Welter said.

Using the description of the car and gunman, they checked records of similar cars registered in the vicinity and conducted intense patrols with marked and unmarked cars. They stopped Bassham about 8 a.m. Tuesday near his home, Welter said.

The caliber of the pistol police found in the car matches the caliber of the bullet recovered from Reyes’ body, Welter said.