Crash halts work for better life

Four migrant laborers die when their van goes out of control and crashes. One had just come to the United States.

By DAVID PEDREIRA

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 5, 2000

WIMAUMA -- Deputies arriving at the van's wreckage found poker chips scattered along dusty Buckeye Road and empty cans of Mountain Dew.

The chips represented how much was owed to the nine migrant workers inside the van for their work picking vegetables. Pink chips get cashed in for $3, green chips $1.50.

Ignacio Baten's mother and 19-year-old sister were in the van when it swerved out of control, hit a tree and slammed into a ditch Friday evening.

Called to the scene, he found them by the roadside, killed after an 11-hour work day that may have netted them $30 apiece, he said. His sister, Santa Lucrecia Baten, had arrived in the United States just last week.

"I don't know why she was so hardheaded in coming here. I told her not to," said Baten, 18, through an interpreter. "She came here to die."

Investigators are trying to determine why the Ford Econoline van went out of control as it carried the workers back to their mobile homes in Wimauma from a vegetable field in Manatee County.

Four passengers were killed. The five others in the van were injured and taken to hospitals throughout the Tampa Bay area.

As of Saturday, the Florida Highway Patrol had released the names of two victims: Santa Lucrecia Baten and her mother, Mariana Lopez-Baten.

Ignacio, who came to the United States from Guatemala a year ago and found a construction job, said Ugo Gonzalez also died in the crash. Gonzalez shared a mobile home with the Batens and another migrant laborer, he said.

One of the workers injured in the crash was eight months pregnant, said Lt. Larry Leinhauser of the Manatee County Public Safety Department. She was flown to St. Joseph's Hospital. "The best we can tell is they were tooling along that road at a good rate of speed," Leinhauser said. "Several people were ejected from the van."

The accident left Baten without relatives in the United States.

A funeral home operator told him Saturday it will cost $5,200 to fly his mother and sister to Guatemala for burial. He said will try to find the money because it's what they would have wanted.

"I'm going to stay here and work because I have two sisters and three brothers (in Guatemala) that I have to take care of," Baten said.

Baten's mother and sister worked in the fruit and vegetable fields of Central Florida from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. six or seven days a week so they could send money home. In a good week, they earned $150.

Baten sat on one of three beds in the trailer's living room Saturday, tapping his foot on the gray plywood floor as he cried.

"It's the necessities of life that brought me here," Baten said.

Florida Highway Patrol investigators said the van had "bench-type" seating. None of the passengers was wearing seat belts.

Rene Cardona, a friend of the Baten family, said many Guatemalans come to the United States because of the strength of the U.S. dollar. They don't find paradise when they get here, he said.

"You work too hard and you don't get paid much, Cardona said. "They kill themselves just trying to pay rent."

-- David Pedreira can be reached at (813) 226-3463 or pedreira@sptimes.com.

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