He Fled Persecution but Wound Up in a Cell : Immigration: Romanian sailor Vasile Boboaca expected to be granted political asylum. Instead, he was rejected and is a detainee.

“Please help me! My name is Vasile Boboaca (and) in my country my life and my family life is in danger . . . I want to emigrate in U.S. America. I trust in god! Long live U.S. America.”

--Note passed April 3 from Romanian Vasile Boboaca to INS official in San Pedro.

Four months ago, Vasile Boboaca finally arrived in America. And ever since, the Romanian sailor has seen his dream of freedom turn into a nightmare of detention.

On April 3, Boboaca and two other crewmen aboard a Romanian cargo ship requested political asylum after the vessel docked in San Pedro. And when U.S. officials asked them to plead their cases, the plain-spoken engineer from the mountain town of Sinaia offered a story of political persecution in his homeland.

But for reasons that remain a mystery to Boboaca, the Immigration and Naturalization Service recently decided that although his two companions will be granted asylum, he will not. And that decision, offered without explanation by immigration service officials, has left Boboaca angry, his companions sad, and their attorney worried about what lies ahead for the 36-year-old husband and father, who last week began a hunger strike to protest his detention.

“I don’t know what (Boboaca’s) going to do,” immigration attorney Frank Ronzio said. “He is really angry. He just doesn’t understand how they could do this.”

Boboaca’s imprisonment at the large immigration service detention center on Terminal Island represents the latest confusing chapter in the story of how three sailors--Boboaca, Mihail Mihaita, 38, and Marian Bondarescu, 26--sought asylum after arriving aboard the cargo vessel Polar IV.

By requesting asylum on the ship, the three men fell under a special immigration category that left them with fewer rights of appeal--and freedom of movement--than the countless immigrants who each year face deportation after sneaking into the United States and later being caught.

The Romanians spent months in detention before immigration officials decided their case.

In Romania, Boboaca said recently, he had everything but freedom. A good job. A wife and 4-year-old son. And for a time, Boboaca said, there was hope that Romania’s 1989 revolution would bring the democratic reforms that he and others, including his father, had fought for.

Many times, Boboaca said in his written appeal for asylum, his father was arrested by police for publicly condemning the ruling communists. And before and after the fall of Romania’s late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Boboaca said, he was persecuted for his political beliefs. He said he was beaten, shot once and, finally, threatened that he and his family would be killed if he continued his protests.

But now, Boboaca is held in detention here, separated from his loved ones and almost without hope, he says, that his life will ever return to normal. And as he continues to spend each day in confinement, Boboaca’s options seem as bleak as his surroundings.

He can continue to seek asylum and spend more months, perhaps a year, in detention. Or he can return to Romania where he fears he will be imprisoned or killed.

“It’s not only the fear . . . prison,” Boboaca said. “There are people who ‘disappear’ ” from prison.

Long before their cargo ship arrived here, Boboaca, Mihaita and Bondarescu said they had decided to seek asylum. Their plan, they said, was to wait until the ship--with stops in Asia and South America--finally reached the United States. And when it did, they decided they would tell their stories of persecution, win asylum and get jobs so they could bring their families over from Romania.

When the ship finally docked in San Pedro and an immigration service official came aboard to verify the manifest of the 36-man crew, Boboaca was the first of three sailors to request asylum, passing a typewritten note to the American officer.

At that moment, the three men said recently, they thought their prayers had been answered.

Said Mihaita in an interview before his release: “I hear about this country. It is the most democratic country in the world. And I am sure, if I am able to come here, my life, my family’s life, is safe.”

But after being taken from the vessel and being held at a San Pedro motel for a week, the men were sent to the detention center because, officials said later, their request for asylum was being reviewed and the shipping company would not take responsibility for their whereabouts.

At first, Boboaca said, he did not mind being held at the center, thinking that it was only a temporary situation. “At beginning, I think it is better . . . that they put (me) in jail. I try to learn English,” he said.

“But after four months, I don’t know about my (family). I don’t know if somebody knows my story, real story. It’s very hard.”

While Boboaca and the others were being held at the immigration service facility, three Romanian stowaways on a German cargo ship were housed for 11 months at a San Pedro motel--and even allowed to visit Disneyland--as they awaited a decision on their request for asylum. Those three were granted asylum last week.

Weeks after Boboaca and the others first sought asylum, immigration officials in Los Angeles rejected the request. In separate letters to the men, Rosemary Melville, director of asylum for the local immigration office, concluded that they had not proven they were politically persecuted in Romania or would face danger if they returned.

But after The Times and Mihaita’s sister-in-law in New Jersey made inquiries about the men, the immigration service re-examined their requests for asylum. And on Aug. 13, the agency granted asylum to Mihaita and Bondarescu, claiming that a return to Romania would put them in peril.

“Upon careful consideration of the facts presented in your case . . . it has been determined you have established a well-founded fear of persecution upon return to your homeland,” Melville wrote in Aug. 13 letters to Mihaita and Bondarescu.

In a recent interview, Melville declined to discuss the reasons the INS reversed itself in the two cases or its decision to again refuse asylum to Boboaca. “We are not in a position where we will discuss individual merits of a case,” she said. “It is a confidential matter.”

Ronzio, the attorney for all three men, said he is baffled by the immigration service action. “I don’t understand why they would choose this course when (Boboaca) had the best of the cases,” Ronzio said.

Although Mihaita and Bondarescu also told of threats and beatings, Ronzio said that Boboaca’s stories of persecution suggested that he was the most aggressive pro-democracy protester of the three. Moreover, Ronzio added, Boboaca’s persecution followed similar actions against his father.

In his April 10 request for asylum, Ronzio noted, Boboaca told the immigration service that he was wounded several times by gunfire in one 1989 pro-democracy protest in Romania. After going to a hospital for his wounds, Boboaca said in his letter, he decided to leave after being told that other anti-communist protesters were “disappearing” from the hospital.

Eight months later, Boboaca’s asylum request said, his political activism led first to a beating by two men at a train station and later to telephone death threats that persuaded him to end his protesting.

“This was the last time when we advise you, the next time we will kill you and your family . . . “ Boboaca said the caller told him.

Ronzio said Boboaca’s letter made it clear that his client’s life was in danger in Romania. Ronzio said the letter, and the statements of all three sailors, made it clear that those such as Boboaca who attempt to flee Romania face peril if they return.

“No one but these people know the true story of what’s happening in Romania,” Ronzio said.

On Aug. 13, after months in detention, Boboaca, Mihaita and Bondarescu were summoned to an office at the detention facility to be told the fate of their appeals.

Originally, they said last week, immigration officials told them that Mihaita and Bondarescu were free to go and that Boboaca’s release would come the next day.

But on Aug. 14, with Mihaita and Bondarescu gone, Boboaca was informed that his appeal had been denied.

“I ask them, ‘Why?’ ” Boboaca said last week. “ ‘Tell me it is because I do not speak English good. Tell me it is because I do not have family here. Just tell me one reason.’

“But they do not give me a reason,” he said.

Until they do, Boboaca said, he will continue to press for answers. And, he said, he will continue his hunger strike pending another appeal, which could take weeks or months for immigration officials in Washington to resolve.

“I continue because that way, I feel victorious,” Boboaca said by phone from the detention facility.

“I was in (Romania’s) revolution, fighting for freedom. I see this land as a symbol of freedom,” Boboaca said. “And if I die here, I will feel free. I don’t want to give communists a chance to kill me. I don’t want to give them that satisfaction.”