Deported Quadriplegic Immigrant Dies In Mexico Hospital

Here’s a sad update to a story we brought you in February of 2011.

Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, an undocumented worker from Mexico who had suffered a life-altering injury that left him quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator, and was deported in early 2011, died this week in a hospital in Juchitan, Mexico.

He’d been in a Chicago hospital for four months, unable to move or speak after falling 20 feet from a roof at a work site.Without his consent or reason given, he was transported to a small hospital in Mexico at a cost of $60,000.00. He had been in that hospital ever since.

The Chicago Tribune takes up the story:

On Sunday, just 30 minutes into the new year, Ojeda died at age 21, said Jeromino Ramirez Luis, director of the General Hospital of Juchitan in Mexico, which took over his care from the smaller facility last month. Ramirez said the causes were pneumonia, sepsis and the effects of the spinal injury Ojeda suffered while working illegally in the United States.

Pneumonia and sepsis notwithstanding, many people belive that his deportation led to his slow death:

“The removal of Quelino from a medical facility in the USA could have possibly contributed to his physical decline and ultimately his death. He would have never received the same treatment in a Mexican hospital as he did here in Illinois,” said Julie Contreras, national immigrant affairs commissioner for the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino rights organization working with Advocate Health Care to create repatriation policies for the large hospital group.

A little background, to put Quelino’s life in perspective:

Ojeda came to the U.S. illegally about five years ago looking for work to help his Mexican family — a common-law wife, a daughter, six sisters and his impoverished parents, who live in a small town of wood and straw-roofed homes in the mountains. He arrived in Chicago in August 2010 and began working in construction on a building near Midway Airport.

There, Ojeda told the Tribune last year, he pulled hard on a sheet of metal he needed to remove, thinking it was secured by nails. It wasn’t, and he fell backward more than 20 feet to the ground.

He was buried Tuesday, in the town of Monte Negro, Queretaro.

En paz descanse.