Grieving Mother Voices No Anger : Red tape: Adela Lopez says she does not blame the INS for delays that prevented her from seeing her dying son. But friends and relatives are upset.

Adela Lopez had never flown on a plane and was unaccustomed to bustling city crowds, yet she braved all that to fly here from El Salvador because her terminally ill son had promised to stay alive to see her.

But at 11 p.m. Thursday, when Lopez was riding in a van from the airport to the Newport Beach nursing home where her eldest boy was lying, relatives had to tell her that she was too late.

Fernando Pedrosa, 25, had died nearly six hours earlier of the leukemia from which he had suffered for almost a year. In his last moments, witnesses said, he squinted his eyes with effort as he struggled to continue breathing for his mother.

Learning the news, Lopez nearly fell out of her seat and said: “ ‘No! He was supposed to wait for me,’ ” her nephew Isaias Lopez recounted early Friday. “She said: ‘I was supposed to be his medicine.’ ”

On Friday, Lopez’s eyes were still red from crying when she appeared at a news conference at Flagship Health Care, where her son had spent his final month. The 58-year-old woman from the village of Amatio, facing a room full of reporters, spoke softly through an interpreter. She said she was not angry with the State Department for refusing her entry sooner and spoke of being overwhelmed by the outpouring of love for her son.

U.S. officials had denied her visa in November because she did not have enough money to guarantee her return to El Salvador, said Rico Cabrera, spokesman for the Los Angeles district office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But social workers and relatives kept striving to make Pedrosa’s dream of seeing his mother come true. On Feb. 12, local INS authorities recommended approval of an emergency visa for Lopez and sent it to Washington. The permit was granted Tuesday afternoon. A family friend flew to El Salvador to escort Lopez on the trip.

Disappointed acquaintances who had been cheering for Pedrosa and his mother said Friday that they were frustrated with the INS for not acting on the request during the three-day holiday weekend.

“The INS was not in the hospital room with Fernando,” said Barry Boyd, a Westminster chiropractor whose secretary volunteered to pick up the patient’s mother in El Salvador. “If they had been here and heard him pleading for his mother, there’d have been an emergency status to get her here over the weekend.”

The escort, Rachel Ortiz, said employees at the airport in El Salvador, where news of Pedrosa’s struggle had spread, criticized the U.S. government for keeping a mother from her dying son.

“They said they now have seen the bad side of America,” Ortiz said.

Late Thursday, Pedrosa’s deathbed was surrounded by flowers and loving messages from elementary school students. Lopez sobbed privately with the body of the son she had not seen since he left for the United States 3 1/2 years ago.

“Why didn’t you wait for me? I’m here. Why didn’t you wait for me?” she said.

Then, nearly 75 relatives and friends were allowed into the room to pray for Pedrosa while two small rabbits snuggled against his body. The rabbits, one white and one brown, had been purchased with coins and wadded-up dollar bills donated by children at Liberty ChristianSchools in Huntington Beach.

Boyd, whose children are pupils there, had told the students about Pedrosa and how the dying man had liked to play with rabbits when he was young. Pedrosa had hugged the rabbits shortly before he died.

Isaias Lopez said Pedrosa’s father and siblings had not yet heard of his death; they were to be contacted late Friday. Amatio is near the Honduras border, about eight hours from the nearest phone.

Lopez had never wanted her son to leave their village. But Pedrosa begged for her approval and promised that he would work to send money back to help clothe and feed his five brothers and sisters.

“He loved her and she loved him,” Isaias Lopez said. “She never thought this would happen.”

Pedrosa’s body will be taken back to El Salvador on Wednesday, the family said.