Barry Gutierrez © News

Oliver Cruz, from Honduras, poses for a portrait in an interview room at Colorado Territorial Prison. Cruz was living in a Denver homeless shelter when he was recruited to help kidnap an Aurora man in February 2001. Cruz, who was ordered deported after missing an immigration hearing, is serving 20 years for the kidnapping, which ended in a shootout with Aurora police.

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Path to prison crosses Rio Grande

By Burt Hubbard and Rosa Ramirez, Rocky Mountain News
June 13, 2006
At the age of 13, Oliver Cruz left Honduras and the grandmother who was raising him. His father had disappeared, and his mother beat him, he says.

Today, he's in prison for a kidnapping that ended in a shootout with police in Aurora.

He said he worked his way to Mexico as a teen and made his first attempt to cross the Rio Grande at Juarez during Easter week 1999.

The Border Patrol caught him and sent him back to Mexico without fingerprinting or detaining him, he said.

"You are lucky it's Holy Week," he recalled being told.

Within a month, he tried to cross again and was caught again.

This time a Mexican border agent told him how he could gain entry by seeking legal status as a refugee of Hurricane Mitch, which had devastated Honduras.

Once in the U.S. on a temporary visa while awaiting his hearing in immigration court on his refugee status, he drifted up to Colorado and found work as a roofer.

His employer knew he was illegal, Cruz said, but told him no one would check his papers.

In the meantime, he missed his immigration hearing and was ordered deported in absentia, he said.

He said he had a close call in Denver in September 2000 when he was arrested for stealing a pair of pants.

"I thought they were going to deport me, but they gave me five days in county jail," Cruz said. He said no one ever asked him about his immigration status.

The arrest cost Cruz his job and introduced him to people who would join him on the path to prison.

He said he was living in a homeless shelter in Denver when he was recruited to help engineer the Feb. 1, 2001, kidnapping of 21-year-old Jose Luis Esquibel.

The kidnappers demanded $20,000 from Esquibel's parents. Cruz's lawyers argued in court that the payment was to satisfy a drug debt, and Esquibel had an outstanding warrant for drug-dealing charges when he was kidnapped.

When one of the seven kidnappers went to the Aurora home of Esquibel's parents to collect the ransom, he ended up in a shootout with police officers.

Later, Esquibel was freed when a SWAT team surrounded the Aurora home where the other kidnappers were holding him.

Cruz is supposed to be deported after he finishes his 20-year prison term.