How a Journey North Ended in Death : Border: Companion of man slain on San Ysidro cul-de-sac says gunman ‘just fired, and then he drove away.’

The morning that Javier Rodriguez Martinez crossed the border from Mexico this week was a surreal rush toward death: it culminated in a cul-de-sac of modest houses, a gray arena where a gunman killed Rodriguez’s best friend for no apparent reason.

In an interview Thursday, the thin 19-year-old described sprinting with his friend, 23-year-old Humberto Reyes, and three other border-crossers through back yards, past snarling dogs, iron fences, angry voices.

He remembered clambering over a wall next to Interstate 5, hearing the shriek of brakes behind him and then two shots, thinking that immigration agents were chasing them.

And he recalled the youthful gunman: dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, crouched in a two-handed firing stance behind the open door of his car 15 yards away. The man fired twice more, Rodriguez said, and Humberto Reyes fell to his knees as cars wailed by on the freeway.

His eyes wet and shining, Rodriguez extended his arms to demonstrate the gunman’s stance.

“He didn’t say anything,” Rodriguez said in Spanish. “He just fired, and then he drove away.”

When Reyes was gunned down on Valentino Street in San Ysidro Monday, the incident drew little attention. It was overshadowed partly by the execution of Robert Alton Harris and partly by the seemingly random nature of the shooting.

Police now say Harold Ray Bassham, 19, chased down the immigrants in his car and shot Reyes because he was angry that the group had run through the back yard of his house, about a block from the cul-de-sac.

“He didn’t have any heart,” said Rodriguez, who describes himself as student. “We hadn’t done anything bad to him. . . . It wasn’t any reason to shoot, to kill a person only for crossing through your garden.”

Bassham was arrested Tuesday, pleaded not guilty Wednesday and is being held on $500,000 bail. Rodriguez is being held as a material witness at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and should be released within a week, authorities said.

Bassham, whose parents described him as unemployed and having a juvenile record for stealing a gun, lives in a housing tract about a mile north of the border: a tense urban frontier where San Ysidro meets the brush-filled badlands of the most illegally traversed segment of the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

The houses bristle with barred windows, tall fences and signs warning of dogs and burglar alarms. The streets are invaded nightly by the shadowy forms of illegal immigrants, who are often racing the Border Patrol toward the freeway. They use the freeway divider as a perilous route to hike north because safety concerns prevent authorities from chasing them there.

The freeway was Rodriguez’s destination Monday.

He and Reyes grew up in Teoloyucan, a small community outside Mexico City, playing basketball, going to the same school--”best friends, like cousins, like brothers.” Rodriguez stayed in high school; Reyes went to work in a slaughterhouse.

But they went north together to Tijuana a month ago. Their eventual destination was Los Angeles, their ambitions to work and study English.

In Tijuana, they worked too: Rodriguez sold tacos and Reyes helped out in a lumber business. A friend put them up and they saved $357 to pay a smuggler who said he would take care of everything. About 2 a.m. Sunday, they joined the expectant crowds on the Tijuana River levee and met the smuggler with two more migrants, a man and a woman, in tow.

As to the dangers of the border, Rodriguez said he had heard mainly about the freeway.

“We knew many people had been run over,” he said. “But you never think that’s going to happen to you. . . . It didn’t seem dangerous. We were mainly nervous about being caught by immigration.”

They made their move shortly after dawn, Rodriguez said. Once over the border fence and across the open grasslands, they entered the subdivision. The smuggler led his charges through several back yards; he said it was a shortcut to the freeway, where they would hike north. He said nothing else about the destination.

A dog charged them in one of the back yards, Rodriguez said, almost biting him. He said he heard a voice in the house yelling “Get ‘em! Get ‘em!” at the dog.

Bassham’s mother said Tuesday she heard her dog barking and her son yelling at what she thought were illegal immigrants in the yard. She said she then heard the garage door opening and presumed her son was going out.

As the group of five emerged from another yard into the street, Rodriguez said, he noticed a dark-colored sedan drive by with a man looking back at them but thought nothing of it. They kept going to the freeway wall at the end of Valentino Street, and Rodriguez and two of the other men went first to help the woman over.

Reyes was still behind the wall, in the front yard of the end house on the cul-de-sac, when the dark car reappeared and shots rang out. Exhausted from the running and the adrenalin, Rodriguez first thought it was the Border Patrol--but why were they shooting?

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to give myself up, because I’m with him.’ And then I saw it was a young kid shooting. . . . I thought maybe he was going to rob us. Or maybe, since there was a woman with us, he wanted to grab her and take her with him.”

After Reyes was hit in the chest and fell, the car sped away, Rodriguez said.

“Humberto just said, ‘Oh, he got me.’ ”

The guide and the others ran away. But Rodriguez jumped back over the fence to his friend’s side.

“I lifted his shirt to see, because there wasn’t any blood. And that was when I saw the bullet wound. . . . He got up and he climbed over the fence with me, he still had strength. And then he said, ‘Stop a car, an ambulance or something, because I feel bad, I’m getting dizzy.’ And then he said, ‘Javier, hurry, soon.’ And then he fell like this, as if he had fainted. And then he didn’t say anything else. That was all.”

Other illegal immigrants trying to cross the freeway saw Reyes sprawled on the cement and kept going, Rodriguez said.

Cars droned past, blurry occupants glancing at Rodriguez but ignoring his frantic gestures. He ran to a freeway call box but couldn’t get it to work. Finally he flagged down a Border Patrol vehicle.

Back in the cul-de-sac, after the ambulance had taken off with his dying friend, Rodriguez sat down on the ground and cried.

There were tears in his eyes again Wednesday, the tears of bravery and loss and anger. He said he is anxious to get out of the federal detention facility, where he is being held in an area reserved for witnesses to crimes.

“I’m nervous, not knowing what’s going to happen,” he said.

Authorities said he will probably be released on bail shortly, though he must be available to testify in a preliminary hearing May 4.

Rodriguez said he will do whatever he can to help prosecute the killer. But then he will abandon his dreams and go back to Mexico.

“I want to go home,” he said. “If for the simple act of crossing the border this can happen, I think (Los Angeles) must be worse. I don’t want to go. What for?”