Young Guatemalan immigrant crushed to death after fall into mixer at Brooklyn tortilla factory

BY Edgar Sandoval, Henrick Karoliszyn and John Lauinger
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Originally Published:Monday, January 24th 2011, 9:04 AM
Updated: Monday, January 24th 2011, 5:38 PM

A young Guatemalan immigrant was crushed to death when he fell into a mixer at a Brooklyn tortilla factory early Monday, police said.

Juan Baten, 22, tumbled into a waist-high tub that was mixing dough at the Tortilleria Chinantla factory on Grand St. in Williamsburg, police and his wife said.

Cops say security video from the plant shows the victim reaching into the mixer, as if to grab something, and being sucked in, police said.

"I'm still in shock," Baten's common-law wife, Rosario Ramirez, 23, told the Daily News. "I got a call at 2:30 a.m. They told me he fell into the machine."

At the couple's tiny studio apartment in Bushwick Monday afternoon, candles burned on either side of a framed picture of Baten and Ramirez and their 7-month-old daughter, Daisy Stefanie.

Fighting back tears as she spoke, Ramirez recalled how her husband was raised in a small Guatemalan village and came to America six years ago.

She said he had been working at the factory without legal documents. He earned minimum wage, but worked long hours so he could support their budding family.

"He worked six days a week, nine hours a day," she said. "He didn't complain; he liked his job."

"He did everything so we could have a better life," she added, noting she plans to bury him in his homeland.

A fellow worker called 911 after the accident, but Baten was dead by the time emergency responders arrived, police said.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is also probing the accident. A spokesman for the federal agency said it has not previously investigated the factory.

A message left on an answering machine at the factory Monday morning was not returned.

Ramirez said all she could think about was her last conversation with her husband.

He usually worked from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m., and always called to check on her about 10 p.m., she said. It was the same on Sunday night - and she only wishes she had said more.

"He would call to say, 'Hi.' It was normal. When I spoke to him yesterday it was the same," she recalled. "I didn't think about it. It was the last time I spoke to him."

She choked up.

"He told me and our daughter, 'I'll see you later.' We never saw him later."

With Sarah Armaghan, Rocco Parascandola and Mike McLaughlin

jlauinger@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/201 ... _mach.html