Mike
Brazilian Wanted to Earn Money to Go Home
By ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press Writer
Los Angeles Times - latimes.com
GONZAGA, Brazil -- Jean Charles de Menezes couldn't get ahead at home so he went to Britain to eke out a living as an electrician, hoping he could return to this rugged, farming community with enough savings to become a cattle rancher.
The 27-year-old mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead last week by police on a London subway recently told family members he would have enough cash in a few years so he would never have to leave Brazil again.
But this Sunday, his father, Matzinhos, cried in the family's small concrete home with red roof tiles at the end of a rutted dirt road. He was holding a recent photo of his bare-chested son smiling while lifting weights.
During the trip home last year, Menezes told family members and friends he was doing well, making good money and friends, and driving a relatively new pickup truck. His father, a bricklayer and lifelong Gonzaga resident, was concerned London could be dangerous, but Menezes told him not to worry.
"They don't have violence," he recalled his son saying. "It's good there, nobody walks around with a gun."
Menezes was killed Friday at the Stockwell subway station as police investigated the series of botched transit bombings a day earlier and the attacks of July 7 that killed 56 people, including four bombers.
Witnesses said Menezes was wearing a heavy, padded coat when plainclothes police chased him into a subway car, pinned him to the ground and shot him in the head and torso.
London Police Commissioner Ian Blair initially said Menezes was "directly linked" to the bombings investigations, but police then said Saturday he had no connection to the attacks. The shooting is being investigated.
Menezes, called "Jim" by his English friends, was believed to have been on his way to repair an alarm in the Wilsden Green neighborhood when he was shot, according to his cousin, Alex Pereira, who lives in London. Menezes carried his electrical tools in a knapsack, and often took the subway to work at different sites around the city.
Menezes' mother, Maria, said her son's fascination with electricity began when he was small, perhaps because it did not reach their home amid groves of banana and orange trees about 12 miles from the town center. When Menezes was 10, he built a radio from scratch and decided he wanted to become an electrician, she said.
"He was just so happy to see that it worked," she sobbed, as relatives consoled her and urged her to keep faith in God.
Gonzaga is a town of 7,000 where restaurants close on Sunday and residents drive their motorcycles around the town square for fun.
Like many Brazilians, Menezes moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, as a young man seeking work. But after years of toiling as an electrician, he decided he would never be able to save enough in a country where tens of millions make only the monthly minimum wage of $125.
Making the decision to leave Brazil was not particularly difficult for Menezes because he was a "Mineiro," or native of the central state of Minas Gerais, long known for exporting its residents in droves to the United States and Europe, where they seek to make enough money for a big nest egg to bring home.
His father said he wanted to go to the United States but could not get a work visa. But he managed to get permission from Britain, relatives said, and became fluent in English after living there for nine months.
Menezes' father learned of his son's death when a doctor from Gonzaga who treats him for high blood pressure showed up Saturday on a special visit, first giving him the treatment and then telling him to brace himself because his son was the Brazilian who had been killed.
His voice shaking, Menezes' father said he still does not know when his son's body will be sent home for burial. Relatives want those officers responsible for the death to be punished.
"We are just hoping that there will be justice," he said.
Added his wife: "I'm totally outraged with the police. How can they kill workers?"
Gonzaga residents remembered Menezes as a smiling young man who loved to come home and hang around with his 20-something friends, who spent their spare time partying because there is little else to do in the town. But, they said, Menezes had a more serious side to him.
"The only things to do here are drink, dance and eat barbecue," said Raimundo Neves, a hotel owner and former trucker whose son grew up with Menezes. "But he hardly drank or smoked."
For good reason, his mother said.
"He wanted to control his future," she said. "He lived for the future and now we have a pain that nothing will cure."
