Brotherhood Crusade : Joe Amado Never Stopped in His Pursuit of Justice in Sibling’s Jail Death

Somewhere in heaven, Joe Amado said, his father and his baby brother are having a celebration.

This week, a Mexican policeman was sentenced for murdering Joe’s brother Mario in a room in the Rosarito jail known as the celda del diablo, the cell of the devil.

It was an extraordinary turn of events in a case that some say never would have made it to trial had it not been for the intervention of a U.S. congressman, the Mexican president at the time, and, behind it all, Joe Amado, who never stopped pushing.

“He was my brother,” Amado said at his Sunland home on Friday. “And it was murder.”

More that three years ago, Amado said, he and his wife, Debbie, went with 29-year-old Mario, of North Hollywood, and Mario’s girlfriend to Rosarito, a beach community where the girlfriend’s parents owned a condominium. The Amados went for a drive, and in the space of an hour Mario had somehow been arrested for drunkenness, taken to jail and was reported dead. The police said that he had hanged himself in his cell with his sweater.

From those first moments, when the couple returned to find broken glass in the kitchen and a window that looked as if it had been forced open, the horror of what had happened unfolded like a slow-moving dream, Amado said.

First, said Debbie Amado, police showed up looking for Mario’s girlfriend, who had left the premises. The officers refused to say what had happened, and said they did not speak English. Then, she said, plainclothes police arrived.

They spoke to Joe, who is fluent in Spanish. But it was obvious what they were saying.

“You don’t really need to know Spanish when you can see the faces,” Debbie Amado said. Mario was dead. Would Joe please come down to the jail to identify the body?

And somewhere in those confused first moments--when Joe was still telling himself that there had been a mistake and that the body wouldn’t be Mario’s--Joe Amado, importer, became Joe Amado, fighter. It is a role he plans to carry on even after his victory.

The initial challenge was simply to persuade the police to give the family Mario’s body and effects. It was decided that Joe’s sister, Dolores, his brother, Alex, and Alex’s wife, Teresa, would drive down to Rosarito to get Mario’s body, while Joe and Debbie came back to Los Angeles to make funeral arrangements.

In the car, Joe was steaming. What if, he said out loud, we hired our own doctor to perform a second autopsy?

First, though, Dolores and her group would have to get the body.

It took three days just to persuade the Mexican police to release it. And when authorities finally turned it over, it was clear they weren’t happy about it, Dolores said.

“I didn’t like the way they treated my brother’s body,” she said at Joe’s house on Friday.

“They brought him in a van on a truck route even though they said it would be in a hearse,” she said, her voice shaking. “I just didn’t think that was right. And when they uncovered the body there was a fly.”

Still, the family swung into action.

Joe organized demonstrations at the Mexican border, holding signs and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mario’s picture. They shouted at tourists, telling them to go back home, begging them not to patronize a country where such things happen.

Once, a group of Mexican citizens shouted the family down.

“I told them they had killed my brother-in-law,” said Teresa Amado. “They said, ‘Well, he shouldn’t have come.’ ”

Eventually, Joe became more sophisticated. He still organized his demonstrations, but he also learned to work the media and gain the attention of local politicians. U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City), a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, interceded, pressuring then-Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to look into it.

Finally, a year after Mario’s death, former Rosarito police officer Jose Antonio Verduzco Flores was arrested.

Before his trial ended, the family patriarch, Joe Sr., passed away, skeptical to the end that Mario’s killer would ever be brought to justice.

But after a 2 1/2-year trial, Verduzco Flores was sentenced on Wednesday to 8 1/2 years in prison.

“It’s a relief,” Joe Amado said.

But Amado, who gave up his business to pursue Mario’s case full time, isn’t slowing down. He has threatened to file a wrongful death suit against the Mexican government and hopes to write a book.

But there’s more to his activism now than pursuing Mario’s killer. He’s changed, Amado said, and now he knows how to work the system. Others have been falsely accused or harmed in prisons in Mexico--and in the U.S. as well. And Joe Amado--armed with T-shirts and signs and his incessant phone calls--says he will be there to fight for them.

“I’m going to be helping other people in the same cause,” Amado said.

“It’s like I’ve inherited a job to do.”