Sunday, August 12, 2007
By Chris Bynum
Staff writer
The Times-Picayune
“Don’t the city officials want us to rebuild? Don’t they want us to work? To earn our money in the right way?” asked Luisa Mejia, her brown eyes big and wide and full, her heart shattered.
There were moments when the tears would stop just long enough for Mejia to see clearly what had happened to her life. Her arms rested across her round belly — her first child, Mariana, is due this month. The body of her husband, Pablo Mejia Jr., lay in a casket an arm’s length away from where she sat in the funeral parlor on Wednesday, the bullet wound in his forehead patched over in a way that the family’s grief can never be.
A handmade rosary of yellow roses from an aunt, notes from friends and family, and a drawing from a 10-year-old godchild had been tucked into the coffin of a young man who had been actively pursuing the rebuilding of New Orleans. He was the third generation of a Hispanic family in New Orleans. The birth of his daughter would begin the fourth generation of family with roots in the city and a determination to stay and contribute to its rebirth.
“So many have been affected by one gunshot,” said Deepak Bhatnagar, a friend and mentor to Mejia. Bhatnagar, a research geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a resident of New Orleans for almost 30 years, said the bullet that killed his good friend was a painful reminder of what is killing New Orleans.
Last Saturday, Aug. 4, Pablo Mejia Jr. reported to work with his friend Ricardo Castillo at a home they were helping to rebuild in eastern New Orleans, in the 5200 block of Sandhurst Drive, just off Crowder and Lake Forest boulevards. Mejia had joined his father’s contracting business after Katrina, figuring that with all the work that needed doing, this would be the best way to help his city and support his new family.
As Mejia and Castillo worked, at around 2 p.m., three gunmen approached the house and demanded money. Mejia had been kneeling at the front door installing a lock when he was kicked inside the house by two of the gunmen. The third came through a second door and put a gun to Castillo’s back. Mejia and Castillo immediately complied, raising their hands as the robbers grabbed their wallets from their back pockets. Castillo said the two men did not resist and even offered the robbers their tools. Still, the gunmen ordered the two men to the back of the house.
In a blur, Castillo recalled, one of the intruders raised his gun toward Mejia’s forehead and fired without provocation. Castillo believes the same fate probably was planned for him, but the blast that killed his friend seemed to shock the robbers and sent all three running from the house.
Castillo called Mejia’s father, who had been at the site until just minutes before the robbery and had gone to pick up supplies.
“I could only hear Ricardo trying to talk, but he was gasping for air as he tried to speak,” said Pablo Mejia Sr. Even without all the words, the father understood that his son had been shot.
Castillo kept vigil over his friend at the house, telling him to be calm, that help was on the way, even though Mejia was unresponsive.
“I thought he heard me,” Castillo said.
Mejia was declared dead three hours later at University Hospital. He was 29.
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In the instant that it happened, Mejia’s murder was officially recorded as just another violent death in America’s most homicidal city, murder No. 112 and counting. It was initially reported in the newspaper in a brief item inside the Metro section, in a city numbed by the seemingly endless daily march of violence. At least five more people have been killed since then.
But to Mejia’s family — his pregnant wife, his parents and brothers and sisters — the cold-blooded murder in broad daylight of a native New Orleanian who did not resist his robbers and was working on a Katrina-damaged house — literally helping to rebuild his devastated city — is a crime that can’t be allowed to pass so quietly. To his family and friends, it is just the latest sign of a city in crisis and desperately in need of leadership on the issue of crime.
After Mejia’s death, his friend Bhatnagar sat down and drafted a letter to the newspaper, but addressed his remarks directly to the city’s leadership:
“This is an everyday story in our city. Then should we not ask the mayor some basic questions? How many names of senseless murder victims has he even bothered to find out? How many funerals of such victims has he attended? How many victims’ families has he visited to understand their pain and provide solace and answers? What safety net has he or his administration provided to prevent cheating, robbery and murders, so that citizens who truly want to rebuild their lives and this city can do so without any fear or hesitation?”
Later, sitting in his office, Bhatnagar was more specific.
“If I were the mayor, I would — just for show and tell — put on my jeans and show up somewhere in the city every day. He can’t rebuild the whole city, but he can set the pace,” said Bhatnagar, who in his letter had asked, “Where in the world are you, Mr. Mayor? No employer in this city would tolerate such abject failure to perform from an employee. Then, why are the citizens of New Orleans not loudly demanding a performance evaluation of the mayor and his team?” He had asked the news media why they don’t print a daily schedule of the mayor’s calendar, why they don’t make him accountable for his time and his efforts.
“The mayor knew when he ran for mayor what he needed to do the job, and he agreed to do it,” Bhatnagar said. “Even the secretary of defense sends letters of condolence to the families of those who died in war.”
Mejia’s family are well aware that they are not alone in their grief, that too many are dying violently, threatening the city’s recovery.
Adrian Mejia, who often helped his older brother on construction sites, said, “In order for New Orleans to come back, New Orleanians have to stop killing New Orleanians and those who are helping New Orleans rebuild.”
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Pablo Antonio Mejia Jr. attended Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic School in the Bywater from kindergarten through junior high school. His family lived nearby, near Elysian Fields and St. Claude avenues, and then moved to Slidell. He graduated from Salmen High School and then enrolled at the University of New Orleans.
At UNO, Mejia studied art and dabbled in engineering. He worked summers in the USDA lab with Bhatnagar. In 2004, he worked with a team of designers in a prestigious national robotics competition sponsored each year by the U.S. Defense Department. The entry, called CajunBot, a robot built by students, professors and engineers at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, did well in the desert tests.
Six years ago, while he was working at the lab, Mejia met his future bride, Luisa, whose godsister had introduced them. He was such an impeccable dresser, Luisa recalled, that she often teased him that she thought he was gay. On their first official date, he took her to the aquarium.
“If you like fish, we will be OK,” he had said, winking at her.
Luisa had moved to New Orleans from Nicaragua when she was 16. She works as a teaching assistant at an English-as-a-second-language school. Before her husband’s murder, she was studying to become a medical assistant.
She had visited his extended family in Ecuador, and he had visited her family in Nicaragua. The two were married on Nov. 22, 2003.
Mejia’s father, Pablo Mejia Sr., has worked at the USDA lab for more than 25 years, where he is now a department manager of building services. After Katrina, which heavily damaged the lab, Mejia Sr. stayed on, but he started the contracting company for his son to run. The elder Mejia saw it as a way to contribute to the city he loved and to create a better financial future for his family.
Mejia Sr. said the family never considered leaving after the storm. They rebuilt six family houses, starting with the grandparents’ home in Gentilly. They lost all their belongings, including, they now realize with longing, many photographs of their murdered son.
Even now the elder Mejia is shaken, but firm in his resolve to stay, despite increasing pessimism.
“I want to continue my life here. I came here to live when I was 27. I am now 56,” Pablo Mejia Sr. said. “After Katrina, we had the opportunity to stay or leave. But all of our family . . . we decide to come back and rebuild.”
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Looking back, Luisa Mejia remembers every detail of Pablo’s activities in the week leading up to his death. Some of the things he did make her wonder if he had a premonition that something bad was about to happen.
“He insisted on going to the grocery on Wednesday, instead of on the weekend like we usually do,” she said. He also insisted on leaving his work on another house in eastern New Orleans to go with his wife for her obstetric check-up. Afterward, he took her to dinner.
“He was still mowing the lawn at 9 p.m. that night,” Luisa Mejia recalled. ” ‘The grass must be clean,’ he had said.”
And then there was Saturday morning, the day he died. He had uncharacteristically gotten up very early that morning.
“Pablo is not a morning person,” Luisa Mejia said. But Pablo was up before the alarm. He awakened his wife before he left. She begged to go with him and said she would spend the day at his mother’s house in Slidell, while he worked on the house in eastern New Orleans.
“Since I was five years younger than Pablo, he treated me like his little girl. He would give me anything, but this time he said ‘No,’ ” she said.
When he left to go to work that Saturday, Luisa went back to sleep, but they would talk by phone, as they always did, several times a day. The last time Luisa spoke to Pablo was at 1:30 p.m., less than half an hour before he was shot.
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As tragic an occasion as it was, the funeral for Pablo Mejia Jr. also represented a kind of vision for a better and more diverse New Orleans, one that hasn’t happened, but could: a Catholic Mass, spoken in Spanish, attended by Hispanics, whites, Asians, African-Americans and Indians, diverse in background and religion, but united in their grief, and their fear for — and of — their city.
The next day, Ricardo Castillo sat with the Mejia family in the grandparents’ house in Gentilly and wrestled with the feeling that he should not have been the one to survive. The Mejia family’s modest but pristine home sat lonely in the leftover destruction from the breaches in the London Avenue Canal.
A homemade street sign on the corner let others know that addresses still existed here. Some houses had been demolished, others simply abandoned, and others were in the slow process of recovery. But there were flowers outside the Mejia house, a freshly swept sidewalk that said people were home and a fluffy dog that welcomed people to the front door.
Castillo came to New Orleans from California to work with Mejia. Like brothers, they were both artists working in construction.
“I cannot imagine to go back to work by myself,” said Castillo, his dark eyes still clouded by the memory of seeing his friend die.
Castillo sat in the comfortable living room with Mejia’s parents — Pablo and Dilma Mejia — Pablo’s 26-year-old brother Adrian and 20-year-old sister Nereida, his grandparents Argelia and Raymundo Fino Sr., and his uncle Dr. Juan Rafael Mejia. They had gathered to remember Pablo, to try to make sense of why he was not with them.
The family members spoke of the sense of danger that many Hispanic workers feel in New Orleans. The Mejias know that, whether accurate or not, it is a common belief among criminals that Hispanic workers carry cash, that they do not use bank accounts. Although this is not always the case, it makes them more vulnerable, they said.
Adrian Mejia said language barriers and a belief that many Hispanics are in this country illegally also contribute to a belief that some crimes against Hispanics will go unreported.
The end result, said Castillo: “Criminals think it makes for an easy robbery.”
Just weeks before her husband died, Luisa Mejia remembered, she was listening to one of the two local Spanish radio stations as she drove to meet her husband at his worksite.
“They reported two men with rifles near Crowder Boulevard, and they seemed to be jumping Hispanic workers,” she recalled. But she never imagined that this would be an omen of the tragedy to come.
What family and friends have lost besides Pablo, they said, is their faith that New Orleans after Katrina can be a better place. For now, that’s a hard concept to hold onto.
Bhatnagar said his daughter is doing her medical residency in Birmingham, Ala., after graduating from Louisiana State University School of Medicine. Before, he always dreamed that she would return home to New Orleans, and she still wants to. But now, Bhatnagar said, he’s not so sure he wants her back home.
. . . . . . .
When Pablo Mejia Jr. arrived by ambulance at University Hospital, doctors gave his family little hope. The damage was too great. Even if he lived, they said, he would never regain consciousness.
Luisa, nearly nine months pregnant, was so distraught that her blood pressure went up dramatically; she was taken to labor and delivery to be monitored and calmed until they could stabilize her condition. Her husband died while she was being treated. She did not get a chance to say goodbye.
Pablo’s father has no desire for vengeance.
“In my heart, I have no resentment for the people who killed my son,” the elder Mejia said. “If they are found, I will let justice do what it has to do, and let the Lord do what he must do.”
But Mejia said there are now places he will not let his workers go, a reality that saddens him.
“That puts me in the category of not helping all of New Orleans rebuild,” he said.
On Thursday, Mayor Ray Nagin suggested in a television interview that the city’s alarming murder rate is a “two-edged sword,” in that the national headlines about the city’s violence serve to keep attention focused on the city’s ongoing needs.
Five days earlier, on his last day alive, Pablo Mejia Jr. got up early in the morning, dressed for work, walked his wife Luisa back to their bed and tucked her in. Before he left home for the last time, he lay his head on Luisa’s belly and sang a song to their unborn daughter.
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Staff writer Chris Bynum can be reached at cbynum@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3458.
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