A father lost, a life in limbo

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Aug. 17, 2007 | 7:26 a.m.

Four years ago this summer, Roberto Zambrano Lopez spent a few weeks passing a hat among family and friends.

His father, Benito, had been shot dead by three teenage thugs on a Sunday morning, and the 16-year-old boy needed $7,000 to send the body home to a town of 500 in Hidalgo, Mexico.

It was 10 times what Benito had paid a coyote in 1995 to cross the border into the United States.

At the time, Roberto learned something: Leaving the country dead can be harder than sneaking in to live.

Now, four years later, Roberto's life has led him to a parallel lesson: Once urban America has absorbed you, it can be equally hard retreating to rural Mexico.

Roberto's father's death and his own odyssey recently intersected.

A retrial of one of the three suspects in Benito's killing brought Roberto and his family to revisit the memories of that summer day in 2003, as well as the time gone by.

On the day he would be gunned down, Benito was returning from Supermercado del Pueblo, a supermarket on Rancho Drive where he bought lamb, onions, peppers, cilantro and other fixings for the barbecue he crafted almost weekly, a way to draw extended family close.

Three teens stopped him on the sidewalk. One shot him five times in the back. They took nothing.

With Benito's death, Roberto found himself tossed into a life in the United States impossible to imagine as a boy growing up on a rancho smaller than most Las Vegas neighborhoods.

His first task was sending his father home.

He raised money from family and the 40 or so people from his hometown scattered across the Las Vegas Valley. The Mexican Consulate helped with transporting Benito's body to the hills beyond Mexico City, to a town with few cars - and guns, for that matter.

The teen joined the same crew of plumbers that had taken in his father, where, he said, "nobody taught me. I just watched and learned." In four years he has doubled his wages to $12 an hour. He sends some of it home, helping pay for lights, gas, his older brother's first year of college, clothes for the little ones.

His father's nephew, Benjamin, has become his guardian, although he is only 29.

"There's a lot you can get involved in here," Benjamin said, explaining how he counseled the teen during the months after Benito's death. "There's gangs, there's drugs. So you try to tell him what's right, what's wrong."

Roberto has worked in houses, buildings, hospitals, gyms, wherever the crew is called. When he's not working, he lifts weights. It's become more important to him than kicking a soccer ball, his boyhood obsession. He's gained 20 pounds, most of it muscle.

In the house he shares with a cousin, he has seen on TV how the divide over illegal immigrants such as himself pitches and reels on the streets and in Congress.

Sometimes, people have called him names. "Illegal." "Go back to Mexico."

"They say they want to get rid of everybody," he said, referring to the estimated 12 million people in this country illegally. "But I think they should just get rid of the bad ones."

Sometimes, he'll see a movie on TV with gangs, cops and guns. He thinks of his father. "It makes me angry, or like I want to cry."

One evening a few years ago, he was driving a 1997 Ford Ranger back from the gym when a drunken driver blasted his Chevrolet Silverado at 90 mph through the intersection of Alta and Torrey Pines drives.

Roberto's Ranger was crushed and he was left with a broken ankle and injured spine. Benjamin, more schooled in the ways of America, got him a lawyer.

Two years of physical therapy later, a lawsuit against the Silverado's driver is still pending.

Roberto remembers lying in the hospital, nurses giving him four shots in his spine. He was thankful to be alive. "God is great," he thought. But then he asked himself, "Why me?"

Apart from frequent visits to the hospital, and work, there have been weekends. He and 10 of his father's cousins and nephews and their families sometimes gather for barbecue - lamb in a pit, the kind Benito was good at cooking. Now Roberto does it, having learned that just as he learned how to pick up a plumber's wrench.

One day, he met a girl. They had an argument. He got in his car and drove away. A cop stopped him, caught him driving without a license and speeding. He spent four days in jail.

"That was one time," he said, "where I thought my father would be ashamed of me."

He misses his father, the advice about becoming a man.

An example? His eyes draw a line along the floor. His body is still.

"That's too hard to answer," he said.

As for his recent day in court, the third suspect in the crime was found guilty for a second time.

Roberto Zambrano Lopez feels the system worked and justice was done.

He'd like to go home, see his mom, his two brothers and three sisters. But he's waiting on that lawsuit.

Meanwhile, his life here follows a humming routine.

"You work all the time. You pay bills."