Injured illegal worker prevails in court

TAMPICO, MEXICO -- People throughout this Mexican port city tell stories of fathers, sons and husbands who went to America to make their fortunes.

The stories vary, but their essence is the same: There's a shadowy border crossing, the purchase of phony work papers, then gritty, grueling jobs that pay glorious amounts of money that almost immediately begins flowing back to this industrial region of 600,000 people.

But darker tales, like that of Francisco Ruiz, are also common: stories of men who came home battered and broken from doing America's dirty work. Men with no money, unable to work as they once did. Men who are burdens to the families they set out to support.

Hispanic and foreign-born workers are hurt and killed in the American workplace at rates higher than other groups largely because so many of them work in dangerous industries that are hungry for cheap labor.

U.S. workers' compensation laws require most companies to pay for injured workers' medical treatment, lost wages, disabilities and deaths, even if the employees are working illegally. But some unprincipled employers abandon their immigrant laborers. And many of their workers, unaware of their rights and unwilling to fight for benefits for fear of being deported, go home to their families to heal.

Francisco Ruiz is a Tampico native who decided to stay in America and fight.

He was partially paralyzed and brain damaged when he fell 30 feet at a construction site near Charlotte. His employer, the Belk Masonry Co., and its insurer refused to pay injury benefits because Ruiz was an "illegal alien."

But Ruiz wouldn't go home disabled, with no money and no way to earn it, to a wife and three children who depended on him.

Francisco Ruiz never expected to leave Tampico.

The son of a tailor, he quit school in the eighth grade to drive a taxi, sell tacos and keep the grounds at a cemetery.

At 19, he married and did well enough driving a truck to build a home for his family.

But when the Mexican economy stalled in the mid-1990s, Ruiz lost his job.

A new job for family

He was 36 on the day in July 1997 when he woke up thinking: "There isn't enough for the children."

When he got to North Carolina, Ruiz bought a Social Security card for $10. Soon, he was washing dishes at a sports bar, living with a friend and wiring money home.

Ruiz also sent home photos of himself looking thin but fit. On the back of one, he wrote to his 8-year-old daughter, Laura: "To my little girl, the most tiny and beautiful and pretty and exquisite and cute and endearing and darling baby ... I love you so much."

On Aug. 21, 1997, Ruiz got a second job. The Belk Masonry Co. offered him $300 a week to work as a laborer for a masonry crew. The boss checked his work papers but didn't call Social Security to verify his number.

Ruiz worked 12 hours a day, from 8 to 5 in construction, then from 7 to 11 washing dishes.

The routine lasted six weeks.

Ruiz still remembers nothing about Oct. 7, 1997.

The insurer said a crane hoisting Ruiz along with a load of bricks collapsed. He plunged at least 30 feet onto a concrete floor and was pelted with falling bricks.

He broke a rib and injured a kidney, and his right lung collapsed. He also hit his head on the floor, severely injuring his brain's frontal lobe, which controls language, memory and motor function.

Ruiz was in a coma, able to breathe only with a ventilator.

His younger brother, Jose, left his wife, two young children and his job in Mexico and rushed to Charlotte.

Ruiz's wife followed, with a temporary pass to enter the country, leaving her three children behind. When she arrived at Carolinas Medical Center, she found the Virgin of Guadalupe medal in her husband's hand.