Five years, few answers for family

 EDINBURG - Robert Dose's appearance in the courtroom looked like the answer to Gladie Cruz's fervent prayers.

But she left without what she had most longed for: a definitive account of her brother's death.

Cruz, who is 28 years old and blind, sat in the 93rd state District Court for nearly all of last week, listening in on Beverly Borroum's trial for criminally negligent homicide. Borroum was the supervisor who, in November 2003, sent Javier Cruz into an Edinburg sewer without a breathing apparatus or a safety harness.

But each witness told a slightly different account of Javier's accident. He slipped on the ladder and fell on top of his friend Frank Hernandez; Hernandez fell on him; he fainted; he tripped. Defense attorneys argued that the pipes were safe and ventilated until a mistake by Edinburg's public works department flooded them with liquefied sewage.

Both Cruz and Hernandez, the medical examiner said, had taken cocaine within a half-hour of their deaths on the overnight job.

"It's all crooked," Gladie's father Elpeidio Cruz said in Spanish on Friday. "All corrupt, evidence and papers and lies."

In the defendant's chair, Borroum kept his eyes straight ahead, until Dose appeared in court in the late morning Thursday, unhappily answering a subpoena from the prosecution to testify.

After lunch, Borroum would change his plea from "not guilty" to "no contest." Dose never testified.

The Cruz family had hoped that Dose - the third man to enter the open manhole on that November morning, trying to rescue Javier and Frank from the sewer - would be able to tell them for sure what happened to Javier, a 22-year-old father of two who had struggled to make ends meet.

Javier Cruz married his wife, Yazmin, when he was 17, but finished his high school degree while working nights to support her and their first child. His graduation photo, complete with cap and gown, is displayed on the front of his gravestone, at Hillcrest Memorial Park in Edinburg.

After high school, he worked a variety of jobs, and they had a second daughter. When he died, she was pregnant with their third, a little boy.

He worked as a security guard, but left when the jobs got too far away to return to his family, said his sister Evelyn Cruz. He was a waiter at a restaurant, a clerk at the Circle K - but the short-term overnight job with L&B Vactor, cleaning out sewer pipes in Edinburg using a water jet, was by far the highest-paid.

Asked about the cocaine found in Javier's blood, both sisters shake their heads. They don't trust the blood tests or the technicians who performed them. After all, they said, their brother died from lack of oxygen, from the suffocating gases in the tube - it says so on his death certificate - but a postmortem blood test showed no methane or other gases in his blood.

"(Authorities) kept a lot of information from us," Evelyn said. She has a folder with her brother's death certificate, affidavits, test results and news clippings, tracing the five years between Javier's death and Borroum's long-delayed trial.

Family members said they were pleased, at least, to see Borroum found guilty by a court. Following his "no contest" plea, Judge Fred Hinojosa declared him to be guilty.

But their hopes that he will spend time in prison for his negligence are likely to be dashed.

Borroum will almost certainly receive probation rather than jail time in exchange for his mid-trial plea, said his attorney, Bill McCarthy.

And the family will be left without what they wanted most.

"If they'd let Robert Dose testify, we'd know the truth," Evelyn Cruz said.

Sara Perkins covers Mission, western Hidalgo County, Starr County and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach her at (956) 683-4472.