Anguish grips forest workers after crash

By Tom Knudson -- Bee Staff Writers
Published Sunday, December 25, 2005

Mariano Ramírez Pablo, 27, sits in his Shelton, Wash., apartment Friday, a day after his brother, injured in Monday's van crash, was removed from life support. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

SHELTON, Wash. - The workweek began early - at 4:45 a.m. Monday with a blue van crowded with nine Guatemalan forest workers barreling down the highway in rain and snow, bound for jobs 2 1/2 hours away in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington.

By sundown Thursday, two were dead and a third lay in a trauma unit in a Seattle hospital, the result of yet another van accident involving Latino forest workers, known as pineros. But this crash - unlike others around the country - was a cruel encore.

Not only did it follow another van crash that killed five Guatemalan forest workers on the same highway last year, it struck residents of the same indigenous Mam village and in three cases the same families.

Now, instead of preparing for Christmas in their own simple manner - typically a cup of coffee and bread shared on Christmas Eve - families and friends of those involved in the crash are preparing for funerals and tending to the wounded.

"It's just really sad," said Mariano Ramírez Pablo, 27, a survivor of both crashes whose 19-year-old brother Antonio died in Seattle's Harborview Medical Center Thursday under agonizing circumstances. "The accidents are getting more frequent and people are dying."

Like Ramírez Pablo, Rene Ramírez Pérez - the 20-year-old driver of the van on Monday and himself a veteran of the earlier crash - also lost a family member in Monday's tragedy, his brother Gonzalo, 16. And there's more.

Domingo Pablo, 19, critically injured Monday, has a brother, Juan Pablo, who is still recovering in the Seattle area from the 2004 crash.

Faustino Pablo - another brother riding in a separate van - rushed to Domingo's side Monday. "I thought," he said, "is it just our destiny - the destiny of our family - to be injured in accidents?"

The difficulties faced by the Guatemalan brush pickers were among the topics of a Bee series published last month, "The Pineros: Men of the Pines." The Bee reported that traveling to work, often in rundown vans without adequate seatbelts, was the most dangerous part of the pineros' day, leading to at least 21 fatalities nationwide - now 23 - in the past three years alone.

After last week's crash, state authorities searched for answers. Federal immigration authorities are interested, too, because nearly all of the workers are undocumented.

The driver, Ramírez Pérez, who fled the accident, has been arrested and charged with vehicular homicide, vehicular assault and felony hit and run.

A sense of disbelief has gripped the tight-knit pinero community here, with many now afraid to venture outdoors. With their friend in jail, facing criminal charges and deportation, the forest workers are doubly nervous.

In a waiting room at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center on Friday night, social worker Dionne Holland tried to reassure Faustino Pablo, who had journeyed 70 miles through pounding rain from Shelton, Wash., to visit Domingo.

"I just want to assure you, we don't call the INS," Holland said, referring to the federal immigration agency, formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "That's not our business." In a coincidence, Holland also had worked with Juan Pablo - the other injured brother.

"It shocked me when I found out" about Domingo, she said. "It doesn't compute. The same thing."

These workers have come here from the tiny Guatemalan village of Todos Santos. Sons and daughters of hill country farmers began heading to Shelton in the early '90s, said Mariano Matias Mendoza, one of the first and an unofficial leader of the community of perhaps 100 workers.

Like many Latin American workers, they were drawn by the lure of U.S. dollars. Working in Guatemala as ranch hands, they can earn at most $3 a day.

Working in the densely forested hills and mountains across western Washington - cutting decorative brush for a $236 million floral industry in Washington that distributes its products nationally and internationally - they earn what to them is a fortune: $30 to $35 a day.

Federal permits to harvest the thick, waxy leaves of "salal" brush cost $50 for 10 days and $80 for 20 days, the workers said.

Last year, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest took in $51,000 from selling salal permits - and $737,000 for permits for all specialty forest commodities, from Christmas wreaths to mushrooms.

A Gifford Pinchot spokesman, Tom Knappenberger, said safe transportation of workers is outside the forest's responsibility. But Matt Geyman, an attorney who represented victims of the 2004 crash, said he expects more from the Forest Service.

"If they know workers are getting hurt by doing the work they do, after getting Forest Service brush-picking permits, I would expect them to do something to try to protect against that," Geyman said.

Sitting in a chair at Harborview Medical Center, where he had come to comfort Domingo Pablo - the critically hurt forest worker - Mariano Matias Mendoza agreed that something needed to be done. Perhaps the companies that buy the brush - or the workers themselves - might set up temporary camps or trailers near the brush fields. "The problem exists because people are having to drive far away to work. The solution would be to bring them closer to their work," he said.

As rumors spread Friday that investigators from Washington's Department of Labor and Industries were in rainy Shelton, some hid inside their apartments. Inside, they talked quietly about the cost to return two bodies to Guatemala. One said the bill could reach $7,000 per body. Some began to raise money.

"I don't understand why this is happening," said Julio Matias Pablo, 33, a forest worker not involved in the accident.

Among those involved in last week's accident, few were more wary than Mariano Ramírez Pablo, who sat on the dirty living room floor of one apartment Friday afternoon, biting his lip and fiddling with a pen.

"I feel like the authorities might pick me up and take me to jail," he said, speaking in his native Mam, translated by an interpreter into Spanish.

Ramírez Pablo, the owner of the van that crashed, was battling doubts as well as grief. On Thursday afternoon, he had stood outside his brother Antonio's hospital room in the west wing of Harborview Medical Center - a hospital that specializes in treating those unable to pay.

A phone was cradled to his ear. On the other end was his father, Roberto, in Guatemala. The conversation was tense and private. The subject: Antonio. Doctors said there was no hope, that his brain was so damaged he needed to be removed from life support. Ramírez Pablo - uncertain, confused and crying - listened. Finally, Roberto made the call: Remove him from life support.

"They told me they were going to disconnect him," Ramírez Pablo said. "That was really hard." But he was not at his brother's side when he died.

"They told me to go see the other person who was hurt," he said. "When I came back, the machines were all disconnected and he was dead. I feel alone here now. Who can tell me not to be sad?"

Was he upset about not being there? He shrugged. It is part of the hard life of a Mam immigrant in America, he said.

"I don't understand very well. I've never been to school - not even one day. I can't read or write. I can barely speak Spanish."

Language difficulties also are emerging as a problem for Rene Ramírez Pérez, the driver being held in Lewis County jail, unable to post his $250,000 bail.

"We were under the impression he was a Spanish speaker - but he's not," said Jonathan Meyer, his court-appointed attorney who has met with his client twice. "We're having a heck of a time trying to find a Mam interpreter," he said.

Ramírez Pérez is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday and will enter a plea of not guilty, Meyer said. Details about the crash - which occurred when the van, with no snow chains, passed a big rig on a curve in a snowstorm west of the small town of Morton - remain sketchy.

After the crash, Ramírez Pérez, who had been hurt in the 2004 crash on the mountain road, fled into the woods. He was arrested hours later, cold and wet, huddling in front of a fire in a roadside tavern.

"I'm not surprised" he fled, said Mariana Sparkman, a social worker who assists the Guatemalan community. "He may have been reliving the trauma from the earlier accident."

Mam forest workers interviewed expressed disbelief that Ramírez Pérez been charged with vehicular assault and homicide. They describe him as a friend and a victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"I feel badly for him," said Ramírez Pablo, the van's owner. Even though his brother had just died, Ramírez Pablo stood up for the driver. "I feel like it should be me" who is in jail, he said, explaining that he had asked his friend to drive because he does not have a license.

At the hospital Friday, Faustino Pablo stared at his injured brother, who was unconscious and strapped in a slowly rotating bed to help him breathe.

A nurse, Louis Rivas, approached with comforting words. Although his injuries - multiple fractures, lacerated liver and ruptured bladder - were serious, he was likely to live.

Rivas asked Faustino if he wanted to touch his brother.

"No, that's OK," Faustino said.

On his drive home to Shelton late Friday , Faustino explained why he had declined: "It would have made me sad."

MORE COVERAGE

For updates, photos and audio, or to read The Bee's "Pineros: Men of the Pines" series, please visit: www.sacbee.com/pineros

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