Boy’s Savior Again Plays a Role

At sea, he had saved Elian.

“He was a gift from God,” said Donato Dalrymple, describing how he and his cousin found Elian Gonzalez floating in an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day while they were out fishing.

But the man who on Saturday picked the 6-year-old Cuban boy up and tried to hide from federal agents in a closet said that, in the end, there was no safe place for Elian.

“They came with assault weapons,” Dalrymple cried, moments after armed agents burst into the Little Havana home of Elian’s Miami relatives and seized him. “We couldn’t resist if we wanted to. Everybody was helpless.”

That the last person to hold Elian before he was wrested from Miami was also one of the two fishermen who found him adrift at sea seems an ironic twist.

Yet Dalrymple’s cousin has suggested that the 40-year-old with the surf’s-up hairdo may have hoped for just such a dramatic moment. “He’s a monkey and a puppet,” Sam Ciancio has said of Dalrymple, to whom he no longer speaks.

As a showdown over the custody of Elian neared, Dalrymple had been spending the night with Elian’s family--and was at the center of the early-morning action. Running after the agents as they sped away with the child, he also was among the first to tearfully describe the raid, which included the use of pepper spray and an intimidating show of federal force.

“I jumped up, I heard little Elian screaming from the couch and I ran to him,” said Dalrymple, his voice anguished. “We knew they were coming, but they could have done this in a civilized way, in a democracy way.”

As he held Elian, Dalrymple said, “Elian was screaming, ‘Que pasa? Que pasa?’ and ‘Help me! help me!’

“They came in with assault weapons, like they were taking a terrorist hostage. And they grabbed the boy. They grabbed him physically. I’m not exaggerating, America.”

Over the last five months, Dalrymple often has described how he and Ciancio--fishing about two miles east of Fort Lauderdale in a 20-foot boat early Thanksgiving morning--saw what looked like debris in the water. “My cousin thought [the inner tube] had a doll inside,” he said. “I thought it was a dead person.”

Elian was dehydrated, barely conscious. Dalrymple, overjoyed to find the child alive, said that he began “to kiss his face and hug him as a mother would.”

Dalrymple, who owns a Fort Lauderdale housecleaning business, has been a regular at the Gonzalez home for months. In recent weeks, he has dropped by daily and frequently has been seen on television with Elian--pushing him on a swing, playing soccer, running around the yard with the boy on his shoulders. “I’m like a big brother to him,” Dalrymple said.

Several times, he has traveled to Washington with the Miami relatives to lobby lawmakers who favored giving Elian an asylum hearing or U.S. citizenship. Marisleysis Gonzalez, who has been Elian’s primary caretaker, calls him “the fisherman” or “Cousin Donato.”

And on Saturday afternoon, Dalrymple again went to Washington with Elian’s Miami relatives, hoping to see the boy.

Although he is not Cuban and does not speak Spanish, Dalrymple often has given reporters his take on U.S.-Cuba relations, life in Cuba and the human-rights violations committed by Fidel Castro’s government.

Ciancio, on the other hand, has avoided the limelight--and spoken disapprovingly of what he calls his cousin’s hunger for publicity.

But the two did travel to Bethesda, Md., together earlier this month to meet with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father, at the home of a Cuban diplomat.

They wanted to meet Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Ciancio told reporters, to gauge him as a man. Ciancio, 41, emerged impressed from the meeting, pronouncing him “a loving father.”

“I understand him more than I ever did,” said the father of two.

But Dalrymple told reporters after that April 9 meeting that Elian would be better off in the U.S.

Ciancio accused Dalrymple of misrepresenting the meeting with Juan Miguel in order to play to Miami’s exile community. “We won’t be breaking bread again.”

Dalrymple, who describes himself as a Pentecostal Christian who has traveled the world as a missionary, said he and Elian had bonded.

“The bond Elian and I share . . . all I can say is that it’s very special,” he said.

*

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.