Death Claims Son Before His Mother Arrives : Illness: Leukemia sufferer dies hours before woman’s arrival from El Salvador.

A leukemia patient, whose mother in El Salvador finally won permission from federal authorities to visit him one last time, died Thursday afternoon just hours before his mother’s plane landed.

Fernando Pedrosa, 25, died about 5 p.m. at Flagship Healthcare Center where his mother was to see him.

“He tried to wait for her, but I guess God didn’t want him to wait,” said his cousin, Isaias Lopez, who was with Pedrosa when he died. “He cried and then he just closed his eyes. . . . He went away thinking his mom was coming.”

His mother, Adela Lopez, arrived late Thursday at Los Angeles International Airport and was whisked away through a back door by relatives. She did not talk to the many reporters who had gathered waiting for her to comment on the situation.

The family, with the help of friends and relatives, cleared many bureaucratic hurdles in trying for the last reunion.

The mother was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department in November because she did not have sufficient money to ensure her return to El Salvador, according to an Immigration and Naturalization Service official.

Then, for more than a month, relatives, friends and social workers had worked to reunite Pedrosa with his mother.

Workers from Community Hospice Care said they tried for weeks to get information and documents from the INS to permit the mother to visit Pedrosa before he died. The workers said they received little information or help from the INS.

Local INS officials said they were not aware of the situation until last week. On Tuesday, an emergency permit was granted by the INS to allow the mother to visit the United States for 60 days on humanitarian grounds.

“We were moving as quickly as possible once we accepted the applications,” INS spokesman Rico Cabrera said Thursday night. “We did the best that we could. We just feel saddened by it.”

Pedrosa’s case was controversial because he was an illegal immigrant. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) said earlier that Pedrosa should have been sent home to El Salvador to die because medical costs had mounted to about $250,000 of taxpayers’ money.

Pedrosa’s condition worsened Wednesday evening.

Pedrosa had not seen his mother since he left for the United States 3 1/2 years ago. The eldest of six children, he had worked in an auto body shop earning money to send to his family, Isaias Lopez said.

Pedrosa was told he had leukemia nearly a year ago and was treated with chemotherapy at Hoag Hospital. He was moved to Flagship Healthcare in January.

Doctors at the hospital had said that Pedrosa should have died a long time ago, but he probably held on for his mother.

About 20 minutes before he died, “We asked him, ‘Are you going to wait for Mommy?’ ” Isaias Lopez recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah.’ ”