Beyond the Usual Scams, Immigrant Family Pays the Ultimate Price

Christopher Martinez never got a chance to hear how poor immigrants are ripping off the system. He never got a chance to hear how all the poor do is take, take, take. He never got a chance to hear what an easy life he was going to have.

That’s because Christopher Martinez is dead at 13 months. He’s dead because his parents walked into a clinic in a Santa Ana strip mall, looking for cheap doctor’s help because they’re uninsured, and instead of finding a doctor may have found a fraud. Authorities have said that the doctor was unlicensed and the clinic was unregistered.

The toddler died April 23 after repeated treatments for what appeared to have been flu symptoms. His parents say a man who said he was a doctor gave their son five shots over three days. When he stopped breathing at home, his parents rushed him to St. Joseph Hospital, but it was too late.

So far, authorities haven’t found the “doctor” who treated the baby.

Obviously, stories like this don’t happen every day. That’s not to say the poor--whether they’re white or Latino or Vietnamese or whatever--aren’t taken advantage of more often than we hear about. It’s just that the usual scams involve things like phony job offers or insurance coverage.

When you’re an immigrant, unfamiliar with the native language and poor, you often take your chances when you need help.

At best, you feel comfortable with someone who speaks your language or seems to understand your situation.

At worst, you can become prey.

Scavenger.

That’s the word Rueben Martinez, no relation to the victim, uses to describe the man who “treated” the Martinez baby. “He ought to be hung with his feet up,” Martinez, a longtime Santa Ana civic and political activist, says. “It’s so sad we have these type of people in the city. We in the Latino community, we’re vulnerable people. We want to believe what everybody tells us. The majority of the people here are law-abiding citizens that have traditions, and they bring those traditions from their country and they come here and because they’re strangers in a country where the language is not well understood, they believe what they’re told.”

As long as the United States has had immigrants, it has had abuse of immigrants. More often than not, the rip-off artists are people in the immigrant’s ethnic group--people in whom they placed trust.

“They don’t know the system,” Martinez says of immigrants, “and you know what, they want to believe somebody.”

The young boy’s parents told a Times reporter they’ve been in the United States for 11 years. They went to the strip-mall clinic on the advice of a co-worker, they said.

Martinez, who runs a barber shop and bookstore, said the more common rip-offs of immigrants involve things like job offers where the procurer wants money up front and then disappears without providing the job. Or, someone will dummy up a green card.

Phony papers are one thing. But phony medical treatment?

Martinez has trouble articulating his disgust with anyone who would pass himself off as a doctor and then prescribe treatment for a sick infant. “Somewhere along the way, somebody wanted to get even with life,” Martinez says of the culprit. ‘I can’t think of a name for it, because it’s not in the dictionary.”

His customers have been talking about the toddler’s death, he says. “They’ve been coming in, shaking their heads, saying, ‘Can you believe that somebody would actually do that?’ I’ve been shaking my head, too. I don’t know what to say.”

A couple of conflicting ironies are at play here. One is that there are probably more legitimate places for poor families to go than ever before. The other is that as the immigrant population continually expands, the illegitimate trade also will flourish.

“We’re a growing population, so it’s going to get worse,” Martinez says. Community groups need to get more involved in such problems, and parents need to get better informed through traditional outlets like schools and city government, he says.

Maybe it will take an infant’s death to remind us that not all poor families are abusing public services. Just as likely, they’re trying to be as low-profile as possible, live as cheaply as possible, and trust sparingly.

In the case of Christopher Martinez, that misplaced trust cost his parents everything.

“We need to protect ourselves and our neighbors,” Martinez says, “because we’re all worthy of success. I don’t care where you’re at, what country, it’s the land of opportunity. If this is opportunity, it’s a big disappointment to humanity. Whoever did this, they deserve the worst.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com