Thread: Mystery story, Guatemalan killed protecting stranger in NYC

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/nyreg ... eless.html

Questions Surround a Delay in Help for a Dying Man

By A. G. SULZBERGER and MICK MEENAN

It will probably never be clear how many people realized that Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was dying.

One man bent down to the sidewalk to shake the man, lifting him to reveal a pool of blood before walking away. Two men appeared to have a conversation about the situation, one pausing to take a photo of the body before departing. But the rest merely turned their heads toward the body, revealing some curiosity as they hurried along.

What is clear from a surveillance tape is that Mr. Tale-Yax, a homeless 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant, lay on a Queens street for more than an hour before anyone called the police. By the time help arrived, he was dead.

Mr. Tale-Yax, who friends said occasionally worked as a day laborer and often slept in public parks, had been stabbed while apparently coming to the assistance of a woman being angrily confronted by another man.

On Sunday, a week after the killing, people in the area seemed mostly unshaken by its circumstances. Many were unaware that someone had died on 144th Street in Jamaica, near 88th Road, in a hardscrabble neighborhood with large populations of Central American immigrants and of homeless men.

But to the question of obligation — whether those who encountered the body should have stopped and helped the man — the answers came quickly.

Perhaps the passers-by thought he was just drunk. Perhaps they were illegal immigrants themselves, too nervous to contact the authorities. Or perhaps they had just learned a lesson that Mr. Tale-Yax so clearly had not: better to keep to oneself than to risk the trouble that comes from extending a helping hand.

“It’s bad,â€

We know little about the individuals and circumstances in this case. The reaction to this story is going to be interesting. Perhaps all three knew each other and all three might be illegal. Some cynical people in the immigration enforcement movement. They will be producing wildly different interpretation than equally opportunistic amnestyists attempting to cast Tale Yax and all other undocumented as saints.

Well, after the Americans have fled things like this will happen more and more. There are just not enough of us around to hold back the third world detachment and harshness that follows.

W

At the Iglesia Cristo Peniel, a small brick assembly hall bursting with Spanish hymns, Uber Bautista, 37, a heavy-machinery operator who identified himself as a church elder, said that he believed the inaction might have stemmed from illegal immigrants’ trying to escape detection.

If every person that walked by the dying man was an illegal - than I think it's high time ICE made its presence known in that neighborhood! Moreover, this situation doesn't say much for the moral character of those who passed by without offering assistance. Heck, illegal or not, at least an anonymous 911 call could have been made. This is very disturbing, even more so if those passing the dying man failed to act simply because they feared the law. These are not the sort of people we want in this country!

[quote]At the Iglesia Cristo Peniel, a small brick assembly hall bursting with Spanish hymns, Uber Bautista, 37, a heavy-machinery operator who identified himself as a church elder, said that he believed the inaction might have stemmed from illegal immigrants’ trying to escape detection.

“So they’re going to be very afraid to call the authorities if they see something,â€

Sad, but this stuff has been happening since the dawn of man.



Kitty Genovese ring a bell???