It is a sad thing to have to say to a child. But if anything good can rise from his sorrow, it is this: In the 18 months since Gil was killed in a hit-and-run accident in Poughkeepsie, the citizens of that city have joined together to give his family a chance at a new life. Spurred by Mannain—who first encountered the family when he telephoned Gil's widow, Elidia, in Mexico to tell her of the calamity—the Poughkeepsians not only raised enough money to send her husband's body home but also to buy his family a place to live and a business to run. "It was the right thing to do," says Mannain.
And it was the beginning of an effort in Poughkeepsie to reach out to a large community of migrant laborers who had once seemed invisible to their U.S. neighbors. While Mannain is quick to credit others ("I didn't do it alone," he says), he has been named one of the country's 32 Top Cops by the National Association of Police Organizations. President Clinton will fete the award winners at a reception on Oct. 22. "Señor Skip helped us put our lives together," says Elidia, 33. "I am grateful to God for putting him here."
After the fateful night of April 10, 1998, gratitude must have seemed far from her heart. Just six months earlier, her husband, a 32-year-old construction worker, had joined the many men from their mostly rural mountainous region—about 240 miles southeast of Mexico City—to journey to Poughkeepsie to work as gardeners and dishwashers. And though Gil had to enter the country illegally, the jobs he found cutting American lawns paid far more than the $18 a day he had earned pounding nails in Oaxaca.
In Poughkeepsie, Gil spent his time working, sending home as much as $800 a month and staying as far from the police as possible. He had no problems until he set out on his bicycle in the late evening of April 10. At 10:30 a 26-year-old driving a station wagon slammed into Gil from behind and then drove off, leaving the young father to die alone in the middle of Route 44/55, a well-lit arterial that runs through the city.
Summoned to the crime scene that night, Detective Mannain felt an immediate empathy for the anonymous victim. For while the career cop respects U.S. immigration laws—"I don't condone illegal aliens," Mannain says—he has zero tolerance for the sort of person who would attempt to shirk responsibility for a gruesome accident. Following leads he quickly collected, Mannain collared the rogue driver the next morning and soon located Jaime Gil's boarding-house room, where he found a letter that included the telephone number of a grocery store in Oaxaca. Summoned to the phone that afternoon, Elidia had a sinking feeling. "I had already sensed something was terribly wrong," she says.
To make matters worse, she didn't have the $4,500 she needed to fly her husband's body home for burial. At this point, Mannain's job was done—he had solved the crime and informed the next of kin. But the grief in the widow's voice gripped him. "How could I hang up?" he asks. "Anyone would have had compassion for a wife and four kids in such a tragic incident."
Mannain thought about his own Irish-Jewish immigrant heritage and about his father, Karl "Monk," a firefighter who had once worked three jobs to support his family. The memory impelled the detective to visit St. Mary's Catholic Church the day before Easter to speak to Rev. John Brinn, who raised $500 at the next morning's Spanish mass—attended in large part by migrant laborers. Other parishioners opened their pockets too, and after the Poughkeepsie Journal took up the story, Father Brinn's fund swelled to more than $20,000.
In a city whose public image had been tarnished by the racially charged Tawana Brawley affair and a grisly case of a serial killer (whom Mannain helped capture), the campaign to help the family of a poor laborer signaled affirming change. "[Gil's death] really exposed the connection between Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie," says Stuart Shinske, the Journal managing editor who sent a team of journalists to accompany Mannain to Oaxaca in June 1998, when he delivered a check for $22,583 to Gil's family.
Though some of the city's estimated 3,000 Mexican workers arrive illegally, Father Brinn says Poughkeepsians have come to respect their courage and work ethic. "We are trying to include them as part of our community," he says. Mannain often visits schools to speak about the Mexican community. And the Poughkeepsie school department recently won a $10,000 grant from IBM to connect their computers to those of students in the Oaxacan village of San Augustin Yatereni, home to many of the men who seek work in the historic Hudson River community of 80,000.
Honorio Rodriguez, who runs a popular Mexican restaurant in Poughkeepsie, credits Mannain for the change. "We feel like Skip is one of us," he says.
As Mannain accompanies Elidia and her children (Gloria, 15, Angelica, 13, Jaime Jose, 8, and Elidia Montserrat, 3) to place white carnations at Jaime Sr.'s grave, it is clear that the man they call tio (uncle) feels very much like one of them. "This is absolutely the most gratifying thing," he says, watching the children run to their father's stone. "To see the love of the family." Mannain, a bachelor with no children of his own, says that when Jaime Jose gets older, he'll invite him to visit Poughkeepsie. Losing his own father to cancer in February seems to have strengthened Mannain's commitment to this family. "We must continue to be strong," he says mistily.
So now they pray. And when Mannain takes a moment to praise the fatherly virtues of Jaime Gil Tenorio, the man whose absence has brought him here, he might as well be talking about himself. "He is something important for both our countries," he says. "In his own way, he is a hero."
Peter Ames Carlin
Jan McGirk in Oaxaca and Tom Duffy in Poughkeepsie
- Contributors:
- Jan McGirk,
- Tom Duffy.
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