Latinos Labor Under Fear of Serial Killer

Finding work is hard enough at the Gulfton day labor site, where immigrant men crowd daily to offer strong backs and cheap labor. But when the best-known day laborer in America is an alleged serial killer known as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a day’s wage gets dicier still for Diego Xiloj and his friends, who say freelance construction work has plummeted since the killer became quarry in a national manhunt.

“I think the employers are scared of us. As long as Resendez-Ramirez is uncaught, it’s going to continue affecting us,” said Xiloj, who is supporting a wife and three children in Chichicastenango, Guatemala.

Neither Xiloj nor other workers said they blame employers for balking at hiring unknown Latinos like themselves. But they, and immigrant advocates elsewhere in the country, worry that the longer the killer runs loose, the greater the chance the search could affect innocent Latino lives.

“We’re always keeping an ear out” for possible violations of civil rights, said Joel Najar, an analyst at the National Council of La Raza in Washington. So far, La Raza hasn’t received reports of any civil rights violations, he notes.

But because the 39-year-old fugitive’s first-glance description is fairly generic--5 feet, 7 inches; 140 to 150 pounds; medium build--Latinos nationwide are feeling new scrutiny by authorities and civilians alike.

Resendez-Ramirez, whose real name is Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendis, is linked to eight murders and at least 30 other aliases. He is extraordinarily elusive, with hundreds of law enforcers scouring the country, and could be anywhere in the U.S., FBI Special Agent Rolando Moss said.

In Houston, it doesn’t help that the Gulfton site, a tidy, city-run enclosure where contractors hire freelance laborers, lies smack next to a Southwest Houston railroad line. Restlessly pursuing a crime spree that apparently began in August 1997, the serial killer has swooped from victim to victim on freight trains, authorities believe, touching off one of Union Pacific Railroad’s most intensive searches since the days of Jesse James in the 19th century.

Labor site coordinator Jorge Tenorio isn’t convinced that work opportunities here have dropped due to the hunt for Recendis. If anything, Tenorio said, the laborers themselves seem to have arrived in fewer numbers recently, which might reflect their own anxiety about the killings.

That edginess has been sharpened by several recent visits by Houston police officers. In one, police arrived simply to ask workers whether they had seen Recendis in their midst, since the onetime farm worker had been known to settle in homeless shelters and migrant camps. Then three weeks ago, an anonymous tipster told authorities she had seen Recendis here. A prompt police sweep proved her wrong.

Meanwhile, the 200-person FBI task force based here and devoted to catching the killer has received information on almost 3,000 other alleged sightings since launching a tip hotline June 8. Only one of those, in a Louisville, Ky., soup kitchen in mid-June, was confirmed, said Moss.

And the reports seem to be escalating. In a 24-hour period ending Friday, railroad officials received reports of sightings near and on trains in Texas, California, Wyoming, Nebraska and Louisiana, said Union Pacific spokesman Ed Trandahl.

The fact that the fugitive belongs to a minority group seems to increase the reports, some Latinos say.

“Many people look at me and they don’t know I’m from Argentina, not from Mexico,” said Marcelo Marini, program director at Channel 48, a Latino TV station here. “The most serious problem is that to an Anglo . . . we all look the same.”

Latinos report the most suspicious treatment in communities where they have little interaction with Anglos, said La Raza policy analyst Joel Navar. For example, the relatively isolated migrant workers in Lexington, Ky., reportedly have been greeted with sharp scrutiny when they go into town.

But Latinos want the killer caught as much as anyone and have been pivotal in solving a similar case, Navar pointed out.

“If the [Lexington] migrant workers tended to have a better relationship with the police community, they might be a good resource,” Navar said. That’s what “happened with Richard Ramirez, in the Night Stalker case in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Ramirez was walking in East Los Angeles, in the Mexican American community, and someone recognized him and they jumped him and pinned him down.”

But if immigrants themselves report mostly fair treatment during the search, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has come under blistering attack. Last week, the Justice Department announced an investigation of INS computer systems after revelations that the agency had taken the killer in custody near El Paso on June 1--then released him to Mexico the following day.

Justice Department officials said last week that the INS’ identification system, rather than human error, is likely to blame for the release of Recendis, who had a 20-year history of legal run-ins as he crisscrossed the border.

The computer system that the agency uses in assessing 1.5 million people caught sneaking across the borders each year is designed to flag those who have been deported for illegal entries before. But the system only goes back to 1997, six years after the last of Recendis’ three known deportations to Mexico.

The longer the manhunt continues, the more confounding the subject himself proves to be. A migrant worker from Puebla, Mexico, he is known to have tutored immigrants in both English and algebra.

His mother, Virginia Resendiz de Maturino, told reporters that he was a cherished, favorite baby but that he was gang-raped by a group of boys at the age of 13 and again while in prison.

Transcribed in hundreds of pages from a 1988 document-fraud trial, the words of Recendis only darken the shadows further. “I wouldn’t try to play with your mind, but there’s many things I don’t know myself,” he told jurors in St. Louis. “Can I tell you who I really am, about all the secrecy that’s in the family? I probably could tell you who I think I am.”

Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau in Washington contributed to this story.

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

Rafael Resendez-Ramirez was later determined to be an alias. Stories July 14-29, 1999 use the name Angel Maturino Resendez; stories after July 29, 1999 use the spelling Angel Maturino Resendiz.

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