‘It was a very gruesome event’ Juan Perez-Febles, state’s monitor advocate

Juan Perez-Febles was one of the few people actually to see the 14 men when their bodies were entombed in the van in which they drowned a year ago Friday.

Perez-Febles was at the Allagash River accident site and watched as the van was pulled out of the water, covered with tarp and placed directly onto a flatbed tractor-trailer truck.

He then traveled in a caravan of vehicles that escorted the truck to the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office in Augusta. He was there when the tarp was removed and the contents inside, including the men’s bodies, were examined.

“It was a very gruesome event to go through,” Perez-Febles said during a recent interview. “The tangled mess of flesh, vomiting coming out of their mouths … Of course I wake up sometimes and see those pictures in my mind.”

Perez-Febles is the state’s monitor advocate, a position within the Department of Labor’s Migrant and Immigrant Services division. He oversees agricultural employers for compliance with federal standards and helps migrant and foreign workers with issues such as wages, housing and discrimination. His efforts were recognized last March when he received the first Cesar E. Chavez Maine Award.

Months before the awards ceremony, Perez-Febles was standing on John’s Bridge above the Allagash Wilderness Waterway where the 14 men died. Within hours of the midmorning accident last Sept. 12, Perez-Febles became the interpreter for the accident’s sole survivor, Edilberto Morales-Luis of Guatemala. He also became his protector.

Perez-Febles stayed with Morales-Luis when he was driven more than three hours to the state medical examiner’s office in Augusta to spend a couple of days identifying his friends’ remains. He stood beside him and interpreted for him at a press conference 28 hours after the accident occurred. At one point during the conference, when Maine’s media were questioning Morales-Luis about what happened, Perez-Febles put his hand on his newfound friend’s shoulder. Then he cut off the questioning.

Inside the van were articles of the men’s lives. Oil and gas containers used to fuel the tree thinners’ saws. Lunch pails. Wallets that contained cash, identification cards and pictures that were wet and needed to be spread out on a floor at the medical examiner’s office to dry and be matched up with the victims.

“There were cans of soup they were taking for their lunches that day that they never opened,” Perez-Febles said. “The shoes being strung around. It was tough. It was an awful site.”

What couldn’t be found right away was the van’s driver, Perez-Febles said. Another man was near the driver’s seat. Morales-Luis repeatedly was asked whether that man was the driver, and he kept telling them “no.” He was asked if he was sure, according to Perez-Febles. The answer always was “yes.”

That sent panic through the Maine State Police crews investigating the accident and studying the van and through the medical examiner’s staff who were retrieving the bodies to determine the causes of death, which was drowning.

“We were afraid we had to bring divers back into the water to find the driver,” Perez-Febles said.

They didn’t.

“We found the driver way back in the middle of the van, underneath a seat,” Perez-Febles said. “I would presume that he was trying to get out. The van flipped on its top so he was disoriented. Probably in his mind what was the top was the bottom.”

Over the last year, Perez-Febles has stepped several times into a 15-passenger van operated by a state employee transport program, Go Augusta. State employees are driven between state agencies in Augusta and Portland, or Augusta and Lewiston, in the vans so they don’t have to use their own cars.

Perez-Febles, who lives in Portland, takes the van to Augusta, picks up his government car there and travels throughout the state to assist migrant and foreign workers in the agriculture fields or the woods.

The van he rides in is “the exact same” make as the one the 15 foreign workers were in a year ago, Perez-Febles said.

Just before the accident, the driver had gotten its wheels stuck in a rut between the bridge’s wooden planks, tried to get them out, but overcorrected. The van flipped off the bridge. In a lawsuit filed against Chrysler Corp., the van’s manufacturer, a Texas law firm claims that 15-passenger vans roll over too easily and need to be retrofitted for safety.

“Every time I’m in one of those vans, I relive those memories,” Perez-Febles said. “If this rolled over, how would I get out? It freaks me out.”

He said that when he sits down in the state’s van, his head immediately turns to look at the rear windows. The sole survivor of the crash escaped through a rear window of the van after it landed on the river bottom. Sometimes, Perez-Febles said, he thinks about whether he would be able to get his body through the windows if the state’s van were involved in an accident. He also looks for door handles and other possible ways to get out.

“It’s traumatized me to have gone through this experience,” Perez-Febles said. “Every time I go in [the state’s van] … I kind of relive the panic. You could see the panic in their faces. They were looking for a way to get out.”