.Who’s Killing the Immigrant Mothers of Fremont?

Twice in three years, foreign-born women have been killed by apparent strangers in the Centerville District. Some residents see hate.

Alia Ansari always wore her traditional Muslim headscarf in public. She was a doting wife and mother who spent most of her time in the Afghan neighborhood of Fremont known as “Little Kabul.” She typically drove her six children to and from school and cricket practice, but on the afternoon of October 19, 2006, she had no choice but to walk.

The family minivan had recently overheated, and her husband, Ahmad, an auto mechanic, was too busy to fix it. So the 37-year-old woman set out on foot to pick up her children from the nearby elementary school. Before she got far, a car stopped and a man jumped out. He walked straight up to Alia and shot her in the head. She died clutching her three-year-old daughter’s hand.

The brazen murder stunned Fremont’s Afghan community and Muslims throughout the Bay Area. Muslim women, in particular, suddenly were afraid to wear their headscarves. “There was definitely fear in the community — even among women who don’t wear hijabs, like me,” said Samina Sundas, founder of American Muslim Voice, a Newark-based nonprofit that seeks to educate people and ease cultural tensions about Islam.

Ansari’s tragic murder wasn’t the first time an immigrant mom was brutally killed on the usually quiet streets of suburban Fremont. Two and a half years earlier, Esperanza Hernandez and her teenage daughter, Carmelita, were clubbed to death as they walked to work. The gruesome double homicide took place less than a half-mile from where Ansari was later gunned down.

The deaths of Esperanza and Carmelita Hernandez have been largely forgotten amid the clamor over Alia Ansari’s slaying. But the two unsolved murder cases share more than just proximity. Ansari immigrated to the United States in 1986, at about the same time as Esperanza Hernandez sneaked across the border from Mexico. Both had no apparent enemies. Both were mothers who usually drove, and both were killed while walking with their daughters. All three victims were immigrants.

To many Fremont residents, the two murder cases appear to be completely random acts of violence in their usually safe city. But to others, the circumstances of both killings scream “hate crime.” And it’s no wonder. In the past decade and a half, this once-whitebread suburb has been transformed into an immigrant haven. And while much of the city has proudly embraced this newfound diversity, there remains a vocal contingent of people who are angry that their formerly homogeneous town is no more.

Fremont police say they have no reason to believe that the murders were hate crimes, and that to label them as such is irresponsible. “We can’t call it something when we don’t have any evidence of it,” said police spokesman Bill Veteran, who also is the department’s primary hate-crime investigator. “And if we were to focus on hate crimes, we are very potentially ignoring other motives.”

But members of the women’s families believe otherwise. They are convinced that Alia, Esperanza, and Carmelita were innocent women who must have been killed because of the clothes they wore or the color of their skin.


Shortly after Ansari’s murder, Melanie Gadener and Anu Natarajan proposed “Wear a Hijab Day” to honor the immigrant’s life and celebrate Fremont’s multiculturalism.

The women came up with the idea after visiting Fremont’s Muslim mosque, the Islamic Society of East Bay, during an open house. “We had heard from the women there — especially after 9/11 — that wearing a hijab drew attention that made them feel uncomfortable,” explained Natarajan, the first South Asian immigrant on the Fremont City Council. “They feel like they don’t belong, and we felt that we should show them that they do belong.” The event eventually morphed into “Wear a Hijab/Turban Day,” expanding to incorporate local Sikh men who also had felt wrongly conspicuous in the wake of September 11.

Rain and wind dampened the turnout at Fremont’s Central Park. Still, about a hundred people braved the bad weather, including Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths. Sundas passed out colorful headscarves from Pakistan. “It’s all about education,” she said. “We strongly believe that if Americans know us firsthand, they will not fear Muslims and will not feel that Muslims are terrorists.”

Yet the event sparked anger from other Fremont residents. One letter writer to The Argus called the idea “absurd,” while Natarajan said she received several nasty e-mails. “One said I should take my religion and leave this country and go back to where I came from,” the councilwoman recalled, noting with irony that she is Hindu and not Muslim.

Whites didn’t always feel uncomfortable in Fremont. But in the past fifteen years, the city has undergone a dramatic demographic transformation. Stroll into one of Fremont’s ubiquitous strip malls today and you may not hear a word of English. More than 120 languages are spoken, mostly by recent arrivals. There are so many newcomers that, according to the latest Census estimates, by 2005, 45.6 percent of Fremont’s 210,000 residents were born outside the United States.

Fremont itself was born just fifty years ago, following the incorporation of five unincorporated districts — Centerville, Irvington, Mission San Jose, Niles, and Warm Springs. The new town grew rapidly, as Brady Bunch-style tract homes sprang up by the tens of thousands. “As fast as they could build homes, they filled up,” Fremont historian Phil Holmes said. The city was especially popular with white families who fled the bigger Bay Area cities in search of better schools.

But Fremont’s racial composition changed radically in the 1990s. Asian Americans — particularly Afghans, Indians, and Pakistanis — flocked to the city after landing high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley. Between 1990 and 2005, 73,000 Asian Americans moved to Fremont, according to Census data. At the same time, many white residents grew disenchanted with the city. During the same period, 46,000 whites moved away. Some were simply fed up with Fremont’s rapid growth and its increasingly nightmarish traffic. But others were uncomfortable with the city’s new ethnic makeup. By 2005, whites made up just 30.6 percent of the population.

Gadener, who runs the Fremont-based nonprofit Foundation for Self Reliance, which assists Afghan immigrants, said a few white acquaintances recently told her that they were moving to places where people are more like them. “People are becoming more racist,” she said. “There’s this growing resentment. Fremont used to be this sleepy town, but now it’s like a mini United Nations. And some of the original settlers of Fremont do not like it.”


Steve Cho experienced this diversity backlash firsthand. In the summer of 2004, the Chinese-American city councilman suggested that flags from around the world be flown during Fremont’s Fourth of July parade. Cho wanted to pump new life into what had become a ho-hum event. But his idea was immediately met with scorn. Critics said Old Glory was the only flag that should fly on Independence Day, and they added that it was time for the city’s immigrants to assimilate.

“There’s a feeling out there that diversity is being forced upon people,” Cho, a moderate Republican, explained in a subsequent interview. “Some people who have been in Fremont for generations are saying, ‘Diversity is not something I wanted.'” Eventually, volunteers brokered a compromise: A parade entry would feature various national flags alongside the innocuous banner “Birthday Wishes from Other Nations.”

But Cho’s critics soon grew angry again. This time it was with the burgeoning Afghan community. In the past decade, thousands of Afghans have moved into Fremont’s Centerville district, a 150-year-old section of the city that was the traditional home of its most conservative white residents. Afghan leaders, in an effort to commemorate their new ethnic enclave, proposed erecting a sign in the middle of Centerville that would dub the neighborhood “Little Kabul.”

The idea outraged members of the old guard. Rona Popal, leader of the Afghan Coalition, described the reaction as “harsh.” In a recent interview, she said Afghan leaders quickly shelved the idea and never dared raise it again.

More evidence of disharmony spilled onto the city’s streets last year when Fremont earned the distinction of being the only East Bay community to host anti-illegal-immigration protests. The demonstrations came in stark contrast to the huge pro-immigration rallies in Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco that attracted tens of thousands of people.

The Fremont protests were mounted by a group calling itself the East Bay Coalition for Border Security. The coalition demonstrated against a proposed federal amnesty plan for illegal immigrants already in the country. The plan was supported by Democrats, moderate Republicans, and even President Bush. But the Fremont group, like other conservative organizations nationwide, adamantly opposed it. Charles Dirkman, cofounder of the group, told The Argus that it intended to become the local chapter of the Minutemen, a controversial vigilante organization that patrols the US-Mexican border: “There’s nothing about the Minutemen we don’t like.” Neither Dirkman nor the coalition’s other founder, Casey Fargo, could be located for comment.

The group protested several times throughout 2006, on the same corner as a taqueria owned by two illegal immigrants from Mexico. Two years before, the taqueria’s owners had endured a horrific nightmare that they believe was caused by intolerance toward people such as themselves.


As whites fled Fremont in the mid-’80s, Maria “Esperanza” Hernandez began her long journey to southern Alameda County. The desperately poor teenager from Querétaro, Mexico, slipped across the border into Southern California. She hoped to find a job and send her earnings back home to her parents, who were taking care of her young daughter, Maria del Carmen “Carmelita” Hernandez.

Like millions of illegal immigrants, Esperanza gladly took a job that many native-born Americans think is beneath them. She worked at a Taco Bell in Santa Ana. In 1989, her sixteen-year-old niece, Helidee “Heli” Hernandez, sneaked into the country and joined her; Esperanza landed her a position at the same restaurant. Heli also wired most of her earnings back home to Querétaro, where her mom needed the money to survive.

In 1992, Heli moved to the Bay Area with her new husband, Filberto “Fily” Cuellar. The two had met three years earlier in Santa Ana. He had been working at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant, and accepted an offer to manage one of the company’s franchises in Fremont. Esperanza joined the couple in southern Alameda County two years later.

For more than a decade, Heli, Fily, and Esperanza toiled anonymously among Fremont’s immigrants — Fily at Carl’s Jr., and Heli and Esperanza at Taco Bell. Most of the time, they worked second jobs. Esperanza awoke well before dawn each morning and headed off to the laundry room of a Fremont nursing home before her afternoon shift at the fast-food restaurant.

In 2002 Esperanza’s daughter, Carmelita, was finally old enough to come to America. The seventeen-year-old slipped into the United States, traveled to the Bay Area, and got a job at Carl’s Jr. She moved in with Esperanza and nine other relatives in a Newark house just across Interstate 880 from Fremont.

But one rainy morning two years later, neither mother nor daughter made it to work.

Esperanza’s boyfriend usually drove her to the nursing home, but in the early hours of February 1, 2004, he felt too ill to drive. Esperanza didn’t have a driver’s license, so she decided to walk the five miles to work. Carmelita offered to keep her company, but after a few blocks in the dark, the two grew afraid. They called Heli and asked for a ride. Heli immediately jumped into her car, but as she lived in Hayward at the time, she said it would be ten to fifteen minutes before she could get there.

When Heli drove into Fremont, she couldn’t find the two women. “I called again and they answered the phone,” she recalled, her voice shaking and her eyes welling up with tears. “I called to see where they were — and they started screaming.” Heli was listening to the brutal murder of her aunt and first cousin.

She and her husband believe the killings must have been a hate crime. They can think of no other explanation. It certainly wasn’t some robbery gone wrong. “They didn’t take no money,” Heli said of the killer or killers. “They didn’t take anything.”

Esperanza and Carmelita’s blood-curdling cries shattered the silence of a quiet, tree-lined section of Centerville. The mother and daughter were beaten to death with a thirty-inch-long thick tree branch at the corner of Alameda Drive and Contra Costa Avenue.

Thirty-two months later, another immigrant woman would be murdered just a few thousand feet away.


On paper, at least, Fremont appears to be a vast hate-free zone. According to an analysis of FBI Uniform Crime reports, Fremont has fewer hate crimes than most other large California cities. It reported just three hate crimes per 100,000 residents on average each year from 2001 to 2005 — the last year for which data is available. By contrast, during the same period, San Francisco reported an average of 18.1 hate crimes per 100,000 people.

But experts caution that such reports are meaningless. “Hate crime statistics, by and large, are completely useless across the board,” said Mark Potok, director of hate crime monitoring at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Why? One reason is that reporting hate crimes is voluntary under federal law. As a result, some police agencies fudge their numbers out of fear that such crimes will damage their city’s image. “They’re seen as bringing bad press to the city,” said Potok, who made it clear that he was not referring specifically to Fremont or any other Bay Area police agency.

Other jurisdictions view hate crimes as a product of liberal political correctness. To them, a murder is a murder, and it’s irrelevant that a person was killed because she wore a hijab or was an illegal immigrant.

Some prosecutors, meanwhile, refuse to charge hate crimes because they can be difficult cases to prove, which reduces the incentive for police to investigate them in the first place. Other agencies just seem too busy to worry about hate crimes. Oakland, for example, has one of the highest violent-crime rates in California and one of the most diverse populations anywhere, but on average, it has reported less than one annual hate crime for every 100,000 people this decade. In 2003, it reported none.

The result is a cavernous gap between the number of hate crimes reported by police and the number that victims say actually occur. According to a wide-ranging study by the US Department of Justice, there are an estimated 191,000 total hate crimes in the country annually. But police agencies nationwide voluntarily report only 6,000 to 10,000 on average. In other words, from the victims’ perspective, the US hate crime problem is twenty to thirty times worse than police agencies say it is.

One final reason for this huge discrepancy is that 56 percent of victims said they didn’t tell police. Illegal immigrants don’t report crimes for fear of being deported. Even legal immigrants may be too intimidated, or disinclined to make waves. Refugees from oppressive regimes such as Afghanistan under the Taliban aren’t in the habit of sharing their troubles with the authorities.

To combat such issues, San Francisco adopted an ordinance in 1989 that declared the city a hate crime “sanctuary.” The law prohibits police and prosecutors from inquiring about the immigration status of victims and witnesses. The following year, San Francisco established a special unit with two inspectors who solely investigate hate crimes. It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the most tolerant places in the world consistently reports more hate crimes per capita than most other big American cities. And it’s not because of San Francisco’s large gay and lesbian population either. The majority of hate crimes in the city are attacks based on race, ethnicity, and religion.

“San Francisco is supposed to be the city of love, but we look like the city of hate,” said San Francisco hate crimes Inspector Milanda Moore. “But at least we’re being honest; we’re not trying to hide anything. … I get really angry when so many cities report zero hate crimes.”

Fremont does not have a “sanctuary” law on its books, nor does it employ a special police unit dedicated only to hate crimes. But Police Chief Craig Steckler has made it a department policy not to inquire about the immigration status of crime victims or witnesses. “Our chief has said we’re not an arm of the INS,” department spokesman Veteran said, adding that Fremont fully investigates every hate crime report that it receives: “We just don’t get that many hate crimes.”


The Hernandez case was Fremont’s first double homicide in nearly twenty years, and the city called in every available detective. As with any murder case, investigators first looked at friends, family members, and acquaintances. When that turned up nothing, detectives investigated whether the killings were gang-related and looked for similar murders in other cities.

America’s Most Wanted aired a story about the murders, and Governor Schwarzenegger offered a $50,000 reward. But neither produced a viable tip. For a time, evidence led detectives out of California, but that trail eventually dried up. Detectives even brought in an arborist from San Jose State University to determine the origin of the murder weapon. “We didn’t leave out any option,” lead detective Tom Severance said. “We looked at everything.”

Yet Severance and the other detectives were not completely in the dark: They had an eyewitness. This person — whose identity police have never revealed — described the killer as being white and about six feet tall, wearing a blue denim jacket with tan sleeves. Police distributed a sketch of the suspect, but never found him, and to this day, the case remains unsolved.

“We have no idea why they were killed,” Veteran said during a November interview with Severance. “I think about the case daily. Last week, I talked to one of our homicide investigators and said, ‘What could we have missed?'”

The two detectives said investigators found no evidence of a hate crime. “It would be easier if we knew it was a hate crime,” Severance said. “It would be much easier if we knew why. But we looked at every possible angle of how this occurred and we didn’t find any evidence of a hate crime.”

Severance and Veteran were tight-lipped about the Ansari case, which is still being investigated. Yet Severance admitted that shivers shot down his spine when he arrived at the scene of the murder and discovered that another immigrant mother had been killed. “Anything that even remotely resembles the Hernandez double strikes a chord with me,” he said.

But police have declined to label the Ansari case a hate crime. Investigators have identified a Latino man whom they’re calling “a person of interest” because he appears to match a witness description. However, authorities are holding the man on a separate crime and have not charged him in the murder.

The Hernandez and Ansari cases are both somewhat unusual because Fremont police have a strong track record of solving violent crimes. Fremont solved 55.1 percent of all violent crimes committed between 2001 and 2005 — the most recent year for data — according to statistics compiled by the California Department of Justice. By comparison, the clearance rates for San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland in the same period all averaged between 30 and 33 percent.

Hate crimes, however, are difficult to investigate, partly because they seldom involve members of known hate groups. “The classic hate crime is just some person driving down the street and shooting the first black person they see,” said Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. As such, the Ansari killing, in particular, appears to fit the profile. “It sounds a great deal like a hate crime,” he said. “It’s a typical case where a person is shot by someone she doesn’t know — for no apparent reason other than her headscarf.”


Unless police prove otherwise, the Hernandez and Ansari families will probably continue to believe that the three women were killed because of the way they looked. Why would anyone want to kill an Afghan mom who was happy and loved, and helped care for a huge extended family — unless it was because she was wearing a hijab? “She never argued, always had a smile,” her cousin, Amin Ansari, told the Mercury News a few days before a funeral that drew five hundred mourners. “In my opinion, I don’t see any other reason for this.”

But not every local Afghan or Muslim believes the murder was a hate crime. Popal, for instance, said there could be any number of motives, including a possible grudge that traced back to Afghanistan. But Sundas, who is Pakistani American, believes Ansari was likely killed because of her religious garb. “All things point to that,” she said. “We’re trying to refrain from saying that because we don’t know for sure. But it definitely looks that way.”

Several Muslim groups led by the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations held an early-November forum to talk about the killing. “We hope that it’s not a hate crime,” council spokeswoman Abiya Ahmed said. “We just wanted to call on law enforcement officials to resolve the case in a timely manner. There were a lot of community members who were concerned about their safety.” Among the hundred attendees were a representative from the US Justice Department and Fremont Police Chief Steckler. The chief assured the crowd that his department was investigating every angle.

If Ansari’s killer did intend to send a message that immigrants are not welcome in Fremont, then that message was heard loud and clear. A week after the killing, Ahmad Ansari bought one-way tickets home to Afghanistan for himself and his six kids. Family members told reporters he was overwhelmed with grief, and that caring for the children, plus his job fixing cars, was just too much. He had a large extended family back home that would help him, they said. Several other Ansari family members subsequently moved home as well.

The Cuellar family, too, was crushed by the horrific deaths of their close aunt and cousin, Esperanza and Carmelita Hernandez. The killings took their toll, especially on Fily and Heli’s children, Kevin and Mary, then aged ten and seven. “When we found that they had been murdered, my sister started crying,” said Kevin, who is now thirteen. He added that he and his sister had bad dreams, and Heli said she and the kids began to fear the dark. “At first, we felt scared to go out at night,” she said. “Now, sometimes when we’re alone in the house and we hear something … it makes us scared.”

Scared or not, the Cuellars are not about to flee. After all these years, Fily and Heli finally saved up enough money to open their own restaurant, El Pique Taqueria, in a strip mall at Mowry and Fremont avenues. And even with all they’ve been through, and even though their kids have trouble sleeping, they have no intention of giving up on their American dream. Quite the contrary; they are determined to become legal citizens despite governmental threats of deportation (see sidebar on page 14).

In that way, the Cuellars are much like the tens of thousands of other immigrants in Fremont, and the thousands more who arrive each year. And there’s no reason to believe they won’t keep coming, regardless of the hate crimes, the diversity backlashes, and the brutal murders of immigrant women.



ESCAPING THE SHADOWS
Heli and Fily’s effort to become citizens turned out badly for the family.

By Robert Gammon

Thirteen months after their aunt and cousin were bludgeoned to death on a Fremont street corner, Heli and Fily Cuellar suffered another emotional body blow. A federal immigration judge in San Francisco told them to leave the United States voluntarily or the government would deport them.

It didn’t matter that they had endured a devastating family tragedy. It didn’t matter that they had been taxpayers for nearly two decades, working low-paying jobs that no one else wanted. It didn’t matter that they were raising two kids while putting in sixteen-hour days, year after year, saving and scrimping so that they could finally open their own business — El Pique Taqueria in Fremont. They had snuck into the country illegally.

The Cuellars’ appearance before the judge was not an unforeseen outcome of their involvement in the murder investigation; it was their own doing. They could have remained hidden in the immigrants’ secret world of fake driver’s licenses and purloined Social Security numbers, but they decided to risk everything and try to become citizens. “We wanted to come out of the shadows,” Fily explained over a recent lunch at El Pique. “I think we’ve done good things for this community. We wanted to be on the level.”

Heli and Fily began their immigration-court odyssey in 1998, when they decided to hire a lawyer and apply for asylum. “We explained to them that this was very dangerous,” recalled the attorney, Norma Molinar of San Francisco. “You’re basically telling the federal government, ‘Here we are!'”

By then, the Cuellars already had two children for whom they chose the most American-sounding names they could think of — Kevin, now thirteen, and Mary, now ten. “I love this country,” Fily explained when asked about his kids’ names. “It’s given me the opportunity I didn’t have in my country.”

As their case moved slowly through the courts, the Cuellars began to realize that Kevin had a learning disability. He’s a smart, outgoing kid, with a contagious smile, but he has trouble concentrating on his studies. At first, Fily said, school counselors blamed them for not being strict enough about his homework every night. Even their family doctor ignored their concerns.

The Cuellars worried that if they were forced to return to Mexico from their tidy, split-level house in Newark, then they would never be able to afford the help Kevin needed. “What am I going to do in Mexico?” asked Fily, who managed Carl’s Jr. restaurants for eighteen years before opening El Pique two years ago.

At their March 2005 immigration hearing, Molinar told the judge about Kevin’s problems. But the judge waved her off, ruling that the Cuellars had failed to prove that Kevin would suffer “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” as required under US asylum law if they returned to Mexico.

The Cuellars appealed the ruling in June 2006 after taking Kevin to a psychiatrist. The doctor diagnosed him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Under asylum law, that should be enough to trigger the hardship exception, Molinar said. “He’s not going to get the treatment he needs in Mexico,” she explained. But the appeals board ruled against the Cuellars, saying they should have taken Kevin to a psychiatrist earlier.

Molinar says she will continue to appeal the case as far as she can, but the Cuellars have few legal options left. At any time, the US Department of Homeland Security could order them deported. If that happens, Fily, Heli, Kevin, and Mary could be forced back into the shadows again. “I just can’t see us going back to Mexico,” Fily said.

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