Immigrant Recounts Friend’s Slaying in Rush for Freedom

Javier Rodriguez Martinez, a 19-year-old from Mexico City who watched a stranger shoot and kill his best friend three days ago, described the morning he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border as a surreal rush toward death.

In an interview Thursday, Rodriguez recalled sprinting with his friend, 23-year-old Humberto Reyes, and three other illegal immigrants through back yards, past snarling dogs and iron fences.

He remembered hearing shrieking brakes, then two gunshots, and thinking they were being chased by immigration agents as they clambered up a concrete wall toward the traffic of Interstate 5.

And he recalled the blank face of the gunman wearing a T-shirt and shorts, who fired again as Rodriguez looked back over the fence and saw his friend since boyhood fall to his knees, fatally wounded.

“He didn’t say anything,” Rodriguez said, his eyes wet and shining. “He just fired. And then he drove away.”

Police say Harold Ray Bassham, 19, chased down the immigrants in his car because he was angry that the group had run through his back yard, about a block from the dead-end street where he allegedly killed Reyes.

Bassham pleaded not guilty Wednesday and is being held on $500,000 bail.

Bassham’s neighborhood, about a mile north of the border, comes alive nightly with fast-moving illegal immigrants who are often heading for the I-5 freeway, pursued by the Border Patrol.

The freeway--and eventually Los Angeles--had been Reyes’ and Rodriguez’s destination.

After Reyes was shot, Rodriguez stayed by his friend, trying to stop the blood, running to a freeway call box that didn’t work and finally flagging down a Border Patrol vehicle. After an ambulance pulled away, carrying his dying friend and their dead dreams, he sat down on the ground and cried.

Rodriguez said he will do whatever he is asked to help prosecute the killer. But then he wants to go back to Mexico. Forever.

“If they’ll shoot you like that here just for what we did, Los Angeles must be worse,” he said. “It’s better to go home.”