http://www.azstarnet.com/news/147907.php

Woman finds scaling fence a costly, painful gamble
By Brady McCombs
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.23.2006

Editor's note: The Arizona Daily Star will publish a four-day investigative report beginning Sunday that examines the feasibility of sealing the U.S.-Mexican border. Look for stories and photos in the Star this week of the places and people our team of journalists discovered during their nearly 2,000-mile journey along the border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.
CAMPO, Calif. — Clutching her right hand in a blue handkerchief, Maria de Rosario's sobs grow louder.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent crouches in front of her. He slowly wraps her severed ring finger in a shirt. He places it in a bag of ice.
"I knew I couldn't do it, I knew I couldn't do it," she says quietly in Spanish to the man sitting next to her, Victor Perez.
Rosario, 25, and Perez, 24, sit with their heads down on a frontage road next to a 10-foot corrugated steel fence that marks the border south of Campo, Calif., about 50 miles east of San Diego.
About one hour earlier, the two climbed over the landing-mat fence as part of a group of Mexican illegal entrants.
The men and women helped each person climb over. Rosario caught her hand on the razor-sharp anvil point on top of the fence.
When she fell to the ground on the U.S. side, pain shot up her arm. Her hand was bleeding. The top third of her ring finger lay on the ground.
A speed bump for illegal entrants? A staircase to the United States? Rosario would offer a different opinion about fences. She would be in the United States today if the fence didn't line the border near Campo.
"Am I going to lose my finger?" she asked while sitting on the dirt frontage road waiting for paramedics to arrive.

Despite the assistance of Border Patrol and local emergency medical technicians, Rosario lost her finger, said Chechstan Hebek, the founder of the California Mountain Minuteman Project. Hebek found De Rosario and Perez on a July evening at sunset and called the Border Patrol.
After being treated at a hospital, De Rosario was voluntarily deported the day after the incident in the evening, said Damon Foreman, spokesman for the Border Patrol San Diego Sector.

Attempting to make her first trip to the United States, De Rosario said she didn't know where she was going or where she would work.
Persuaded by friends, she decided earlier that day to try. As she wiped tears from her eyes, she said she regretted her decision and would never try again.

"It's kind of sad, but you still have to be going by the law," said Hebek, as he stood by his teal minivan while waiting for the Border Patrol to arrive that evening. A naturalized U.S. citizen from Czechoslovakia, he comes from San Diego for about two weeks every month to patrol the Campo area of the California border, he said.

Carrying a gun on one hip and a cell phone on the other, he drives up and down the frontage road stopping at different spots to use his binoculars to look for illegal entrants.

When the Border Patrol agent asked, he gave him an old white T-shirt to wrap the severed finger and a bag of ice to keep it cold.
A few minutes later, as the agent wrapped the finger, he told Dan Russell, a member of the Campo Minutemen who arrived to the scene later, "I send to Fox the bill," referring to Mexico's president.

As night fell, the headlights from an ambulance lit up the area as paramedics gave De Rosario oxygen and bandaged her hand.
Hebek and Russell said they felt bad for De Rosario but worse for the citizens of the United States.

"More money from the taxpayers of the United States," Russell said.

● Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or at bmccombs@azstarnet.com


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