An American Tragedy
A Family Is Dead. Where Does The Blame Lie?
By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 17, 2002; Page F01
Standing just in front of the first row of pews, a little girl watches the steady stream of mourners as they pass the open caskets that contain the Herrera family's remains. The father, Israel, lies to the far left, his graying temples belying the fact that he was only 30. Five-year-old Caleb, in the casket next to his dad, is dwarfed by the formality of his good suit and tie. In the third casket rests Alba, 35, holding her daughter, 2-year-old Dayrisha, who in turn is holding a white teddy bear. The family looks peaceful.
The preschooler, perhaps a relative, clutches her own stuffed bear and stands back quietly, taking it all in. Then, when a visitor seems to linger too long, or ponder too deeply, she steps up to offer clarity.
"They're dead," she says in Spanish, lest you thought the four unblemished corpses were sleeping.
Hundreds pack the first of four funeral services that stretch well into the morning at the Iglesia Pentecostal Eternal Church in the Montgomery County community of Damascus. In death, as in life, personal space yields to the needs of the community, and the mourners spill into the aisles and occupy every seat in the overflow room where the service is televised.
Hour after hour, people stand and wait and shout and sing. They press against each other or are propelled forward by the momentum of the crowd and the singsong rhythm of the Spanish sermon that periodically erupts in waves and tears and shouts of "Gracias!"
No one talks about how the Herreras died. And no one asks why.
Montgomery County officials have expressed sadness and frustration at the deaths. The town house in the Derwood section of Rockville, where two families lived together to afford the $1,200-a-month rent, did not have working smoke detectors or fire extinguishers. The basement, where the Herreras lived, lacked an outside door or window escape. Though a firehouse was only minutes away, there was nothing rescuers could do. Quite simply, officials say, the Herreras had been entombed.
All five members of the other family -- the Girons -- escaped by jumping from an upstairs window. Of the home's four bedrooms, they occupied three. And for three years, the Herreras had lived in the fourth, in the basement. Although they had hoped to move, family members say they didn't complain. It was the price they paid for $450 rent.
Days after the Jan. 5 fire, at a news conference in front of the burned-out town house, Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan fulminated about landlords who don't adhere to fire safety codes. And the Herreras' extended families traveled from El Salvador.
While Duncan talked about the need for affordable housing and announced that two criminal citations had been issued to the landlord, Javier Argueta, another Salvadoran immigrant, the families merely said it was God's will.
Argueta's wife, a deaconess at the church, was an usher at the Herreras' funeral. The three families had all been friends. To a person, those closest to the Herreras expressed no anger toward the Arguetas for their deaths.
"She could have been killed in El Salvador, and we would never have found her," Alba Herrera's father, Francisco Novales, said later. She might have died crossing the border or in the war, he said, and by the time we "found the body, the dogs would have eaten it." At least this way we know what happened, her father said. And that seemed to give the old farmer a deep measure of peace.
There are degrees of American dreaming.
For those who see the world through a prism of accountability and regulations and safety codes, there can be a sense of the rules as logical and inviolate -- someone dies tragically, someone else is at fault and must be made to pay.
But for many, life is often lived without government oversight and guarantees. They lean on family and community to make it through, and they cling to faith for comfort and the promise of a better life in the hereafter.
A family needlessly dies in a tragic fire, yet this is a story without bad guys. One with only an irreconcilable set of facts and layers of reality.
It is a few days after the funeral, and Rafael Giron, 45, and his 21-year-old daughter, Diana, are sitting just inside the now-empty 750-member Salvadoran church, where he is co-pastor. It is where, in 1995, Alba and Israel met and married and attended services five days a week. It is where, in 1997,Rafael Giron became friendly with Javier Argueta, who occasionally attended services with his wife.
Though Giron has been in the United States since 1984, when he, his wife and two small daughters slipped across the border from Tijuana, his English is uneven, so Diana translates.
Early that Jan. 5 morning, she awoke to her father's screams. For a moment, she was disoriented. She thought it might be an earthquake -- like the kind she remembered from El Salvador. She opened her bedroom door and joined her sisters, Evelyn, 15, and Emely, 12, in running to her parents' bedroom.
Smoke filled the room, and family members took turns sticking their heads out of the window to breathe. The mother, 41-year-old Morena, decided to jump out of the second-story window first,then she begged the others, "Jump!" frantically piling together old boxes on the deck to break their fall.
Emely, hysterical, refused. So Diana pushed her. Evelyn jumped next, then Diana and her father jumped together.
No one was seriously hurt, and Rafael ran to rouse his friends. "Get out, get out!" he screamed, and then broke the window, one floor above where the Herreras slept. Flames shot up the side of the house.
He thinks Israel knows he tried his best to help.
Rafael is a quiet, philosophical man. He smiles and shrugs in equal measure. The Herreras were not the first friends he has lost.
During the Salvadoran civil war, which began after a military coup in 1979 and continued until 1992, at least 75,000 people, out of a population of 5 million, died. A half-million were displaced from their homes. Another half-million fled the country.
Rafael's home town, Soyapango, was a base for guerrilla fighters. He saw friends die; body parts littered the streets. His father was a preacher, and people would whisper through the window of his house begging for food and water. Rafael was a truck driver, and his truck was commandeered by guerrillas, who made him ferry weapons and supplies. They would have killed him if he had refused, he says, and the army would have killed him if it had found out.
People were always poor, always hungry, always afraid, Rafael says. That's why he fled El Salvador, settling first in Silver Spring. Later he moved to Los Angeles and, on a construction job in 1992, met Israel Herrera, who had escaped two years earlier.
The Girons became his surrogate family, and when they returned to Montgomery County in 1994, Israel moved with them into a Rockville apartment. Later, Herrera rented a bedroom with another family, but he moved back into an apartment with the Girons after he married Alba in 1995.
Rafael made about $7.50 an hour as a truck driver and construction worker and held a second job as an auto mechanic before becoming co-pastor of Iglesia Pentecostal. His wife cared for their four daughters (a married daughter lives in Burtonsville). He and Israel, a construction worker and handyman, helped each other with the rent and the homesickness.
"In our country, all the time families were together," Rafael says. "We live together and make everything together. Sometimes the neighbor comes to our house for sugar or coffee or food. Whatever they need. That's why when we come to these places, we live like that."
Diana says reporters have repeatedly asked whether they are furious at the landlord, who is accused of violating two of the most basic safety codes the county has. She said the family has responded over and over: "If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. We miss the Herreras, but it wasn't the Arguetas' fault."
Besides, Rafael says, he has forgiven worse.
The church is now home to former police officers and former guerrillas. In El Salvador, they tried to kill each other, but here, Rafael says, "we are all together and live like family."
The 911 call came in early, says Brian Geraci, Montgomery County's assistant fire marshal, and firefighters got there within minutes. Aided by thermal-imaging cameras, they found the Herreras in less than five minutes. Caleb and Dayrisha were together in one bed, their mother in another. Rescue workers performed advanced life support -- clearing their airways, doing CPR and beginning intravenous lines -- but they were already dead. Israel was on the floor. They were able to restart his heart, but he died a few days later without regaining consciousness.
Investigators think the slow-burning fire may have started in a small appliance. It began on the floor above the Herreras and spread to the upper floors first. Geraci says the flames wouldn't have touched the Herreras for another 45 minutes -- says the family probably could have escaped right past them. If they hadn't died of carbon monoxide poisoning, slowly, possibly without waking. If the house had had a working smoke detector to sound an alarm.
The town house had been struck by lightning in 1999, destroying the same room where the Herreras perished. Argueta had done much of the repair work himself, Geraci says. Because the cause of that fire was known, it wasn't investigated, and it's unclear whether the smoke detector worked at the time.
At the news conference after the fatal fire, County Executive Duncan called attention to the county's increased funding for affordable housing, he expressed sympathy for immigrant families, and he put landlords on notice: If they violate housing codes, the county is coming after them.
He reiterated the tough stance a few weeks later, after a meeting with state lawmakers: "This family should not be dead. I know people double up, but you've got to obey the law."
Often, it's not that easy, says Maria Maldonado, director of housing programs at Casa de Maryland, a Takoma Park-based nonprofit outreach organization that works with the county on safe housing issues. She points out that many people who have heard about the need for smoke detectors since the public awareness campaigns began almost 20 years ago often put off installing them or checking their batteries, so why is more expected from immigrants or poor people? "Are they going to call an electrician? Probably not. They don't have the money."
Moreover, there's a huge gap in making the transition from a very poor country to a technologically advanced one, Maldonado says. "I've dealt with people putting plastic in ovens or parents unconcerned if kids take knobs off the stove," she says. "There's no sense that the plastic could cause fire or the fumes could cause brain damage."
And that gap can persist even when people have been in the States for years, because the immigrant community is often very insular and isolated.
Immediately after the second fire, Geraci says, a dozen firefighters and public safety officers canvassed the neighborhood, checking smoke detectors and handing out fire safety information in English and Spanish. Of the 50 detectors checked, half needed batteries.
A few days later, Geraci brought Argueta into his office and issued him two criminal citations: failure to have working smoke detectors and failure to have a secondary means of escape from the basement. Each citation carries a maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.
"He was quiet, he looked pained, but he understood," Geraci says. "I told him he needed to get a lawyer."
A trial is set for March 28.
Javier Argueta, 35, says he has been depressed since the fire. Reached by phone at his Germantown home, he says he has talked to Rafael about four times since the fire. He says Rafael tells him it wasn't his fault.
"I never tried to squish anybody to make myself rich," says Argueta, a carpenter for a Rockville construction firm who fled El Salvador in 1984. "I never meant to put anybody in the basement, but everybody got to have a place to live, you know? [The three families] tried to help each other. I don't charge $1,200 to Giron and another $500 to the people in the basement. I only say sorry, and sorry is not enough. What do people want me to tell? I'm guilty, I've got to go to jail. I loved those people."
Argueta says he knew the property had a smoke detector, but hadn't thought to check it. After the fire, he says, he went to Home Depot and replaced the batteries in the smoke detectors in his own house, where he lives with his wife and four children. They weren't working, either.
At the Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs, Director Elizabeth B. Davison is awash in facts and figures, but they boil down simply.
"There is an extreme shortage of housing at all income levels," Davison says, and this problem is acute for low-income housing. There is a less than 2 percent vacancy rate for apartments, and the waiting list doubled last year. And that's for people who could afford the countywide average rent of $1,030 a month.
Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa de Maryland, says Montgomery's Latino population -- which increased 81 percent, to 100,604, in the last decade -- is economically diverse, but the majority earn less than $20,000 a year.
The county is struggling to catch up. Its Housing Initiative Fund, which provides low-interest construction and rehabilitation loans, was increased to $15 million last year, double what it was in 2000. And there's a low-income voucher system for apartments, but if you find an apartment that qualifies, 10 other people want it as well.
Then, of course, getting the apartment means passing the landlord's background check for rental, credit and criminal histories. For those who are system-savvy, it's a lot to navigate. What do you do if you don't speak English, if you haven't established a credit history or you're illegal?
Davison says that the department has Spanish speakers and that landlords don't check immigration status. They try to work with families to find housing, to bring houses up to code, and if all else fails, "if they call the office, we'll give them a free smoke detector. We'll even come out and install the damn thing."
That finally sounds like an opening just big enough for families like the Herreras to squeeze to safety.
Until you talk to Rosie McCray-Moody, a landlord-tenant investigator in the department. She echoes the litany of programs available for the asking, then says: But people don't ask because they "don't know we exist." And because it would never occur to them that there would be laws governing the minutiae of people's housing, let alone a regulatory agency to enforce them, they don't even know they don't know.
Two years ago, the department stepped up outreach efforts. Three times a year, housing personnel canvass specific neighborhoods, inspecting homes and dropping off bilingual literature. It trained the Casa de Maryland staff to make inspections, and last fall the department sponsored a housing fair, which it advertised on Spanish radio. But Davison concedes that the department's efforts are irregular and still embryonic.
And that small window of safety closes tight.
It's a Saturday morning, nearly three weeks since the funeral, and the extended families of Israel and Alba Herrera are gathered inside the Gaithersburg apartment of Claudia Canales, a member of the Damascus church. The women are dressed in loose-fitting skirts with their hair pulled back in ponytails. In keeping with their religion, no one wears makeup, and wedding rings are their only jewelry.
Canales, 25, a legal secretary who came to the United States with her family when she was 3, was friends with the people she calls Hermano Israel and Hermanita Alba, and she had helped the Girons when they had problems getting their green cards. She remembers living in a basement with a cardboard box for a kitchen table for years when her family first came from El Salvador. As a tiny woman with a long silver ponytail begins talking, she translates.
Israel's funeral was the first time Maura Cely Flores de Herrera, 58, had seen her oldest son since 1990. That was the year she and her husband found out the 19-year-old was on an army recruiting list, and they borrowed $1,000 to send him across the border with a "coyote," a people-smuggler.
She says he had been a good son. He sent pictures of his wife and kids, called every two weeks and once a month sent money, usually $150, but more when she was sick. Five years ago, he sent $600 to pay for the funeral when her husband died. Since then, he had been her sole means of support.
"He would always say, 'Mama, why don't you try to get a visa so you can come stay with us?' " But de Herrera says she always thought there was time: When she was older. When he and his wife became citizens. When they had good jobs and could help her get a green card. Then, together, they could bring her four other children and their families, and they could all be together.
At least, that had been the dream. It's dead, too.
Still, she doesn't blame the Arguetas. She shrugs her frail shoulders. "Maybe if they had an alarm or another exit, they would have been saved, but with God, you never know why things happen."
She wipes away tears. She's not sure how she'll support herself when she gets back to El Salvador, but supposedly the church, which helped bring her here for the funeral, will send money for two years.
For Alba's parents, Elsa and Francisco Novales, the funeral was their second trip to the United States. Last year they visited Alba and two of their six other children who live in the area. They say Alba wanted to move, that she realized the room needed an outside exit, but the family couldn't afford anything else.
The Novaleses sent their children from El Salvador one by one as the civil war intensified. Military or the guerrillas, it was the same thing, Elsa Novales says. "It didn't matter what side you fought for, you were going to disappear and die."
Even dying young, they say, Alba had had a better life here.
A family dies, and the reasons why turn on themselves without end.
Having the latest equipment and a firehouse two minutes away and still losing the Herreras is frustrating, says Assistant Fire Marshal Geraci.
The lack of affordable housing is frustrating, says Housing Director Davison.
The fact that people don't know we're here to help is frustrating, says housing investigator McCray-Moody.
Landlords who violate basic safety codes put people in harm's way needlessly, says County Executive Duncan.
He is frustrated.
Alba and Israel Herrera left El Salvador to escape desperate poverty and the violence of war. They were illegal immigrants and spoke little English. Alba, denied a work permit, had already received a notice of deportation. For three years, they lived with their children in the basement of a low-rent town house with no outside door and no windows and no working smoke detector. All of that is why they died.
It is unclear whether they too had been frustrated.