San Diego — 'Slow down! You're not carrying animals back here!" It was the last thing Roberto Alvarado Galindo remembered yelling. The accident happened just before midnight on September 4, 1995. It bore a haunting similarity to last weekend's fatal accident in which a Border Patrol Ford Bronco filled with seven suspected illegal immigrants tumbled 1000 feet off the Otay Mountain Truck Trail, southwest of Dulzura. Four men, including the Border Patrol agent, died in this most recent accident, and four immigrants were injured.

What happens to the surviving injured immigrants? A San Diego psychologist believes authorities should take Roberto Alvarado's story into account.

On that night in September 1995, Roberto, then 28, and his brother Celerino, 32, had just crossed the United States border, illegally, from Tijuana's Otay area. They didn't get far. Almost immediately light beams swung onto them. Agents of the Border Patrol ordered them out of the bushes and into the back of their Bronco. Celerino took the last seat. Roberto had to sit on a spare tire.

That's when the driver, Border Patrol agent Gregorio Lopez, apparently responding to another call, misjudged a section of the dirt trail.

"They crested the hill and left the roadway," CHP officer Mark Gregg later told the Union-Tribune. "The vehicle rolled down a 65-foot embankment. On the way down, three of the four undocumented immigrants were ejected."

The County Medical Examiner's Office said Celerino died of several massive blows to the head and body. Roberto suffered severe scrapes and bruises on the left side of his face and bruises on his arms. He would later complain of chronic anxiety, headaches, blurred vision, pain in his legs, and a post-concussional disorder.

"The government admits all liability for the negligence of the Border Patrol agents who were acting within the course and scope of their employment," wrote United States District Court judge Napoleon Jones three years later.

Jones was writing last December 3, at the conclusion of the wrongful death and personal-injury lawsuit that Roberto and his brother Celerino's family had filed.

On the other hand, the government did not see why it should pay Roberto the $400,000 his lawyers claimed for physical and emotional injuries received, or the $1 million Celerino's widow and heirs sought.

That's where Ricardo Weinstein comes in. Weinstein, who labels himself one of the few "bilingual/bicultural" psychologists in San Diego, says Roberto and Celerino are a perfect example of why he is so busy these days.

"We unfortunately have a very racist system here. The lives of Mexicans from rural areas, who come across to work in California's fields, are not worth what our lives or injuries are worth," he says. "It's like they're subhuman. I see it in depositions. When the [lawyers for the other side] take my depositions, they ask racist questions that reflect their beliefs. Things like, 'But even if they're brain-damaged, what's the difference? What could they do before anyway? What abilities did they lose? Brain-damaged or not, they can still pick strawberries.' "

Not only that, Weinstein says, but many Hispanics going through San Diego's criminal and civil justice system are at the mercy of medical experts who don't -- can't -- understand them. "When you're talking of emotional problems, brain injuries, if [the psychologist] doesn't understand the client's language and culture, it is almost impossible to come up with a proper diagnosis."

Look at what happened to Roberto Alvarado, he says. "He was transported and treated at UCSD Medical Center hospital. He was still very disoriented. He remembers nothing until a couple of days later in the hospital, which is typical of what's called 'mild traumatic brain injury,' MTBI. And the diagnosis of that consists of some kind of unconsciousness, amnesia of no more than 24 hours, and basically a blow to the head, a closed-head injury -- meaning it didn't crack the skull. The question is, what are the emotional consequences for some individual of this background after such a traumatic experience?"

Weinstein says that the attitude toward Roberto was so indifferent that it wasn't until "people from the mortuary came in and told him" that he learned his brother had died at the accident site.

"After a couple of days he was released from the hospital, with orders to come back within a week for follow-up treatment and evaluation," says Weinstein.

Instead, the INS transported Roberto back to the border and dumped him there with a bus ticket provided by the Mexican consulate to his village of Calihuala in Oaxaca.

"He went back home," says Weinstein. "But fortunately, with the assistance of the consulate, he got representation through a local [San Diego] attorney. That's how I got involved with the case. The attorney financed his expenses to come back, got him the legal documents to [return to] San Diego to get the treatment he needed, and the full-support evaluations.

"But how do you measure his brain damage? This is a man who comes from a very impoverished upbringing. He has very little formal education. He has worked all his life in agricultural activities. The question is, what are appropriate damages? The assumption is it doesn't matter, because if you're not a brain surgeon, not an attorney or something like that, what's the difference whether your brain works or not?

"So [during the three years it took for the case to come to trial] he went back home to Calihuala in Oaxaca. But he couldn't go out in the fields anymore, because he was in pain, his back was in pain, he couldn't lift, he couldn't do the work he used to do. Also, one of the things people with head injuries experience is that when you work out in the field all day, sometimes you become photo-sensitive. The sun hurts. You get horrible headaches.

"His wife had to go and find work. She started buying fruit from different producers on a very, very small scale and taking it to the market and making a few pesos, and that was how the family was being fed. And that's where the macho issue comes in. His whole sense of identity, to be able to provide for his family and children...was [gone]. Plus he lost the ability to make love with his wife. This is both legally and psychologically [relevant]. Because there is a value to that."

Weinstein says that is especially so in Roberto's village in Oaxaca. "They don't have electricity there, they don't have movies, they don't have theater, they don't have TV. So what you do for fun and entertainment is-- sex. And if you can't do that, that too cuts into your ability to enjoy life, especially in a macho society."

All this was relevant because late last year, when Roberto sued the U.S. government, the argument was over how much post-trauma suffering Roberto has endured and how much that is worth in monetary compensation. Weinstein says in this situation in San Diego, it doesn't pay to be an illegal Mexican immigrant.

"I don't know how racist you think this is, but if you are an undocumented Mexican immigrant, your damages [likely] will be based on what you'd be able to make in Mexico. So this young man's damages have to be based on his income that he would have in Oaxaca, which is basically something like $1000, $1200 a year. Whereas if he was here, minimum wage is $12,000 a year. But that's how they calculate damages."

"Plaintiff [Roberto Alvarado] Galindo suffered a past earning loss of $4997 based on a pay of 40 pesos [$4] a day for six days a week [over three years]," wrote Judge Jones. "The government provided evidence that the present value of Plaintiff's future earnings until April 2000 is $2033."

Then there's the problem of plumbing the psychological damage of someone with a completely different cultural foundation. Anglo psychiatrists wouldn't be able to understand the way Roberto expressed things, says Weinstein. "Roberto was extraordinarily depressed," he says. "But that's something that is difficult for him to explain. He would tell you he felt sad, or he's got -- not even headaches. They talk about the nuca, which is the base of the skull, the nape. That's where they get the pain, which is very physical."

Weinstein says with Mexicans who have little education, there is a tendency to somatize -- to make all your ailments physical. "For instance, they won't say, 'I'm nervous.' They'll say, 'I'm sick to my nerves.' They physically believe that there's some illness in their nerves. It's a way of making symptoms concrete. He would say things like, 'I can't go there anymore, because I don't know where I am.' The untrained professional would conclude that he's just making it up. Malingering. What he would mean was 'I don't remember what I'm supposed to do. I get lost. I go to places I used to go, and now I don't know where I am.' But of course, he doesn't have the language to communicate the symptoms adequately."

"Can you imagine what happens when you [have to] communicate in a language you don't speak with a physician who doesn't understand your culture? When you're talking of emotional problems, brain injuries, it is almost impossible [for him] to come up with a proper diagnosis."

That, says Weinstein, who grew up in Mexico City, is a major problem for San Diego: the shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists who speak Spanish and understand the many facets of Mexican-Hispanic culture.

"Roberto also had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but again, because they are not able to tell you about recurrent intrusive flashbacks, or memories, they talk about 'visions.' This young man would talk to me about walking by the river and getting the vision of his brother [Celerino], whom he often used to walk with by the river. He'd just appear before him. That's cultural. We would call them a flashback.

"So the bottom line was that eventually we did do a full neuro-psychological evaluation, and the test that I utilized, which I have to adjust to the cultural upbringing and background, certainly showed a post-traumatic brain injury, or a mild TBI."

Judge Jones was not convinced. "Insufficient evidence was provided to show that plaintiff had brain damage caused by the accident, or amnesia," Jones wrote in his judgment.

Nevertheless, Weinstein says Roberto was lucky to get this judge. "I think Judge Jones is a very decent man," he says. Indeed, although the judge only awarded Roberto $2033 for future loss of earnings, he added $57,000 for "past and future pain and suffering," as well as paying $16,000 for past medical expenses and $5000 for future medical expenses. He awarded his brother Celerino's widow and three children $345,105, most for "past and future noneconomic damages."

The last time Weinstein saw Roberto, things had improved, significantly. "He still wasn't able to go out into the fields and work, but he was able to help his wife a little bit more. He now felt comfortable because he understood his limitations based on his brain-injury, being [more] the caretaker of the children than his wife. He valued that. He valued the fact that if he took care of the kids, his wife could go out and sell the fruit, and he could help the wife. And the good news is they had another child, so their sexual life has improved too."