Story and photos by J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

More than 1,000 men, women and children have met the same tragic end this decade in the Arizona desert, trying to cross into the United States. Behind those deaths are more than a thousand stories of ambition or desperation. Here are two more stories of fallen migrants identified through the DNA work of Baylor University scientist Lori Baker.

OLAF AVILA GONZALES, 19

Hometown: Real del Monte, Hidalgo, Mexico

Died: June 2004, southwest of Tucson, Ariz.

Olaf Avila didn’t risk his life crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to escape grinding poverty.

He had a job. He had a high school education. He had a mother willing to put him through engineering school.

Olaf came to America in pursuit of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He died for that dream.

MULTIMEDIA

Video → Remembering a 17-year old from Tlapacoyan

Slide shows → The lives of two teenagers

• Real del Monte — home of Olaf Avila Gonzales
• Tlapacoyan — home of Fidel Sanchez Rojas
• Rafting near Tlapacoyan — Fidel's passion

Audio slide show

• Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

He was 19, the third of four children. He lived in Real del Monte, a former mining town north of Pachuca, Mexico, where tourists would come to shop, eat trout and take pictures of the old mines and quaint tin-roofed buildings.

Olaf loved to ride, loved to work on bikes, loved to head out into the mountains with his motorcycle friends and go camping. He looked tough with a mustache, long hair and a leather jacket, but he graduated high school with good grades.

His mother had a decent salary from working at the local prison, and she planned to put him through engineering school in nearby Pachuca, as she had put his older sister through medical school.

But that summer of 2004, Olaf’s friends persuaded him to come with them on a trip into the United States. They would enter illegally in Arizona, then make their way to Tampa, Fla., where they would get temporary jobs doing plumbing at the airport.

“He wasn’t planning on staying there,” recalls his mother, Rosa. “He just wanted to get a better bike. ... In his case it was more than anything an adventure. ... A guide that used to live in the U.S. encouraged them to go, saying it was a better life there.

“I tried to talk him out of it. But I always respected his decisions. With my children, everything they decided to do, I would support them.

“He was excited about it. His friends had painted such a pretty picture, that he could get whatever he wanted. They left June 23, 2004. They had a flight to (Nogales, Mexico) at a quarter to 3 in the afternoon.

BROKEN PROMISE LAND

Running through Wednesday, this series will explore the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

SUNDAY: Part 1 Hoping to find employment in the United States, two cousins and a father from Tehuacán, Mexico, cross the Arizona desert, where their dream threatens to turn deadly.

MONDAY: Part 2 In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s pursuit of illegal immigrants is a cat-and-mouse game where the cat often saves the mouse. As border enforcement increases elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, so do migrant deaths in southern Arizona. Critics say the effort to curb border crossings isn’t working.

TODAY: Part 3 As Arizona morgues fill up with unidentified bodies found in the desert, a Baylor University scientist uses DNA to help crack some of the toughest cases.

MORE: Two among hundreds: Teenagers' dreams die in Arizona desert

WEDNESDAY: Part 4 A family in Tehuacán, Mexico, deals with the emotional aftermath of a disastrous border crossing, all while offering a south-of-the-border perspective on the personal and economic motives that cause Mexicans to risk their lives in the Arizona deserts.

About this series

• Audio slide show → Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

This project examining the perilous crossings of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border was made possible by a World Affairs Journalism Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C.

For three weeks last summer, Tribune-Herald staff writer J.B. Smith traveled to three towns in Mexico to interview families of dead illegal immigrants identified in Waco by Baylor University forensic DNA scientist Lori Baker.

He also spent five days in September visiting southern Arizona, where all of those immigrants died. He traveled into the desert with Border Patrol agents and volunteers from a locally based humanitarian group and visited the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Smith continued his research well into December, conducting interviews with anti-illegal immigration activists and policy-makers, including the head of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Beginning today and running through Wednesday, this series explores the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

“I remember it like a movie. When I told him goodbye, I said, ‘What if I don’t see you again?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m coming back. I’m just going for a short period.’ ”

Olaf left with the U.S. equivalent of $3,000, including $2,000 for the smuggler to take them through the desert, then to Tampa. The group was to cross the border at Sasabe, Ariz., about 50 miles southwest of Tucson, and walk for about three days to a highway where they would be picked up and taken to Florida.

He would call his sister, Diana, when he arrived in Tampa.

“Their relationship was very close,” Rosa says. “But she never received the call.”

More than a week after the desert journey began, Olaf’s friends called and said the group had made it.

“We thought it was strange that all those days had passed, and he did not talk to us,” Rosa says. “We were suspicious.”

Within a few days, they heard a rumor that Olaf had died in the desert. They got back in touch with Olaf’s friends in the United States, Rosa recalls.

“The version we got from his friends was that the Border Patrol found them and they ran in different directions, and my son got lost and that La Migra had caught him,” she says. “That was the version that they maintained for about a year.”

For several months after her brother’s disappearance, Diana made calls to government officials. That fall, she got in touch with Jeronimo Garcia Ceballos, an official at the Mexican Consulate in Tucson, who specializes in missing immigrants.

Olaf Avila Gonzales' sister, Diana, and mother, Rosa, say his trip into the United States was driven largely by a lust for adventure.

He asked for a detailed description of her brother and his clothing, down to the size and brand. When she mentioned that Olaf had white tennis shoes with orange insteps, Garcia became intrigued. He remembered the Border Patrol had found a skeleton near Three Points, Ariz., more than 40 miles north of Sasabe, on Sept. 5. It was found with a pair of white-gray Nike gym shoes with orange insoles.

The lead was promising but inconclusive, and it fell to forensic DNA specialist Lori Baker in Waco, Texas, to finally prove the bones were those of Olaf Avila Gonzales.

When the bones were returned to the Pachuca airport, the family was there to pick them up and kept a vigil over them until they could be buried at his birthplace in the state of Mexico.

They still travel to see him at the cemetery. On the Day of the Dead, they bring him posole soup, peanuts, flowers, beer and the meat pies that are famous in Real del Monte.

“It’s been three years now,” Rosa says. “It’s easier to live without him, but it’s still hard.”

Olaf’s traveling companions are back in town now, but they haven’t talked with the family.

‘‘I don’t want to talk to them,” Rosa says. “From the beginning, they didn’t tell the truth. I don’t want to get more confused.”

Diana says she would rather remember the fun times with her brother, such as the time he brought her back a live crab from his motorcycle trip to Veracruz, or the time she nearly wrecked his motorcycle and she accused him of worrying more about the bike than about her.

“He was always laughing, very innocent, trusting of people,” she says. “I’d have to say, ‘Come on, get real.’ ... I still have to remind my mother he’s not here.”

* * *

FIDEL SANCHEZ ROSAS, 17

Hometown: Tlapacoyan, Veracruz, Mexico

Died: May 2006, Tohono O’Odham Indian Reservation, west of Tucson, Ariz.

His life began at the river and ended in the desert.

Fidel Sanchez Rosas grew up by the Filo-Bobos River in southeastern Mexico. Sometimes after a storm, the floodwaters gushed down from the mountains of northern Veracruz and swamped his family’s bamboo shack.

As a boy, he roamed the woods of the river valley with his brothers. He dropped out after primary school to work in the orchards as his parents and grandparents had done.

The smell of fruit hung heavy in the air around Fidel’s hometown, Tlapacoyan. Roadside stands were stuffed with oranges, grapefruit, limes, mandarins, plantains, bananas, even pineapple and coconut that flourished in the Gulf Coast humidity.

But in this lush land of plenty, you couldn’t pick your way out of poverty. During orange season, from fall to spring, the pay was only 700 to 800 pesos (U.S. $70 to $80) for a hard week’s work. Work was unsteady in summer, when there was little to pick besides guava and limes.

Fidel had ambitions for something more. At 15, he started working part-time for a rafting company, Rios Extremos, learning the ways of the river. Once he crashed into a rock and broke two teeth. But his boss saw his skill and promoted him to whitewater rafting guide by the time he was 17.

“He was a good boy,” recalls his boss, Jehu Alarcon. “He worked hard, no drugs, no vices other than a beer or two every now and then.”

The boy took some courses so he could tell the tourists about the river and its ecology. Sometimes he entertained them with his breakdancing.

The foreign tourists would tip him well. Some days he would make up to 700 pesos — about $70 in the U.S. — the equivalent of a week’s wages in the orange groves.

Isabel and the elder Fidel Sanchez Rosas of Tlapacoyan, Veracruz, Mexico, discuss the anguish of waiting for a phone call from their son, Fidel, 17, who crossed into the Arizona desert illegally in 2006 with friends and promised to call his parents soon afterward. The call never came. DNA evidence confirmed he died in the desert. An orchard owner discusses the lime business as his workers eat breakfast. To his right is Rene, 16, brother of Fidel Sanchez Rosas, who died crossing into the Arizona desert in May 2006. Fidel and the rest of his family worked as day laborers in the fruit groves, a job that is barely sufficient to keep food on the table. Rene and Alfredo Sanchez Rosas, brothers of Fidel Sanchez, paddle away from La Cascada Encanta, a waterfall near Tlapacoyan, Mexico. They work for the same rafting company that employed Fidel as a whitewater guide.

But the work was sporadic. Fidel had a girlfriend he hoped to make a wife, and he wanted money to buy a home and maybe start his own rafting business. The opportunity came in April 2006, when he was 17.

Two friends from Tlapacoyan were going to the United States via Arizona, on a trip arranged by a local “coyote,” or illegal immigrant guide. Fidel got in touch with his girlfriend’s brother in Florida, who could get him a job painting houses.

He told his parents, Fidel and Isabel, that he would be leaving the next week. They didn’t ask many questions. They had little idea of where Arizona or Florida were.

All they knew was they had five boys at home and little money to raise them on.

“Here the jobs are scarce, almost aren’t there,” says the elder Fidel Sanchez, 43. “He said, ‘I’m going,’ and I said, ‘Good, son.’ ”

“He was so big, I couldn’t stop him,” says his mother.

The boy got a loan from a local man for 8,000 pesos (U.S. $800) and bought a ticket to leave April 27 on a bus to Altar, Sonora, in northern Mexico. He called three days later from Altar. The next day, he called his girlfriend from the town of Sonoita, just across the border from Arizona, and told her he was about to cross into the desert with a group.

It was the last time anyone in Tlapacoyan heard from Fidel.

Eight days passed before the family heard from Fidel’s two friends who had accompanied him. Their story was vague. They said the travelers were resting when they were spotted by the Border Patrol. Everyone took off running except for Fidel, who wouldn’t wake up, the friends said. They waited for him about half a mile away, but he never came and they assumed the Border Patrol had picked him up.

That summer, the family moved out of the bamboo shack and into the concrete house their oldest son had built so they could use the telephone to talk with officials in Arizona and the state of Veracruz.

The search dragged on into summer. Then on July 31, 2006, the tribal police department on the vast Tohono O’Odham Indian Reservation in southern Arizona found a skeletonized corpse.

With the bones were a backpack, a can of beans, a Calvin Klein belt, a bottle of mayonnaise, a tube of toothpaste, tattered clothes and a plastic bag with a birth certificate. The certificate was for Fidel Sanchez Rosas, born June 9, 1988.

Mexican officials contacted the family with the news. Still, enough questions lingered about the identity of the bones that Mexican consular officials and Arizona forensic examiners decided to confirm it through DNA. In Waco, Dr. Baker analyzed a bone sample from the corpse and a drop of blood from Isabel Sanchez.

In early summer 2007, Baker confirmed the two were mother and son.

During a visit in Tlapacoyan in August 2007, the family was still awaiting the boy’s cremated remains. They were also looking for a way to pay off the $800 debt, a huge amount for their humble means. They have threatened to sue the coyote but don’t want to ruin him because he has young children of his own.

Fidel’s brothers were hoping to scatter Fidel’s ashes into the Filo-Bobos River that he loved. His parents wanted to bury the ashes in a cemetery. The important thing for all was to have the boy’s remains back in the land where he belonged.

“It’s for a memorial, to have a grave here that we can visit as a family, me and his mother and his brothers,” the elder Fidel said.

“I want to visit him on his birthday and on the Day of the Dead,” Isabel said. She wanted to make him an altar and, in keeping with Mexican tradition, visit the grave on Nov. 2 with flowers and his favorite foods: tamales, gorditas, oranges.

“Today we have nothing of him,” she said. “My other sons have to work in other places. I feel lonely at home, with only my youngest son for company. I want a place where I can go visit (Fidel).”

As of December 26, 2007, Isabel Sanchez said she still had not received the remains of her son.

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

757-5752