By Scott Smith
Record Staff Writer
July 05, 2008

The sudden death of immigrant worker Pedro Servin amid a blistering Central Valley heat wave two years ago may have attracted little attention under different circumstances.

But a Stockton attorney for the dead man's parents, who live in Mexico, said the fact that the employers at General Pallet in Vernalis hauled the 43-year-old's body away from their work yard to a nearby orchard and left him sitting propped him up under a tree caught his attention.

"Obviously, they were trying to escape responsibility," attorney Douglas Gessell said.

Gessell said he's prepared to prove that brothers Jose and Joe "Billy" Lopez, owners of the Vernalis pallet firm, and their employee, Rogelio Sanchez, were negligent for abandoning Servin's body to avoid paying his elderly parents workers' compensation benefits and other possible fines for violating labor law.

The hardships immigrant workers face on the job have been in the limelight recently with the death of 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who died May 16 of heatstroke after laboring under the sun in Farmington. Her death sparked calls for tougher enforcement of California's agriculture labor laws.

In Servin's case, Gessell has filed a lawsuit in the San Joaquin County Superior Court seeking an undetermined amount of money in punitive damages from the three men for intentionally inflicting emotional distress on Servin's parents.

Superior Court Judge Carter P. Holly is expected to rule in the coming weeks on a pretrial motion filed by General Pallet's San Francisco law firm. The motions argue that Gessell can't show Servin's bosses intentionally tried to hurt the dead man's parents and they don't deserve punitive damages.

There's no dispute that Servin's body was moved to the orchard, but Gessell said it's clear to him that Servin's body wasn't given proper respect, treated even worse than garbage.

"What are you required to do with your trash?" Gessell said. "You can't just throw it around. Here you have a person who dies, and you don't treat him with the same respect that you treat garbage. Unbelievable."

Gessell's case is based on a report by Stanislaus County sheriff's Detective Frank Navarro. Gessell said the report proves the Lopez brothers tried to cover up the fact Servin died on the job. An attorney for General Pallet disputes the report.

Servin died June 23, 2006, while working on his boss' sports utility vehicle at the company's Vernalis headquarters. The migrant laborer collapsed and within moments died, according to the report. Servin earned $6.75 an hour as a laborer and worked there a year.

The heat wave that summer lasted 12 days and reached temperatures as high as 115 degrees in the Central Valley.

A worker who saw Servin collapse told the investigator that the downed man uttered, "I don't know, just ... " and closed his eyes. An autopsy determined that he succumbed to heart failure, the result of an existing heart problem possibly exacerbated by the heat.

Joe Lopez told the investigator he and his brother decided to move the body, putting Servin in the back of Jose Lopez's GMC Yukon. Jose Lopez and Sanchez, the employee, drove the body to an orchard near a company house the worker lived in, the report says.

Joe Lopez tried to hush up his employees, threatening to call Border Patrol agents if they broke the secret, an employee told investigators. Confronted by a detective himself, Lopez admitted that Servin died at work and he helped move the body, the report says.

Sheriff's deputies turned to the public for help to determine the dead man's identity, placing an ad in two local newspapers with his physical description, the coroner's report says.

The Stanislaus County District Attorney's Office filed no criminal complaint in the case.

Mark Perelman, the attorney representing the owners of General Pallet, is challenging Gessell's claim. He said a perfectly reasonable explanation will come out of the court case that was filed in February and is just getting started.

"We don't have a lot of facts at this point," Perelman said. "I think that the story that finally comes out will be quite a bit different from what's in the plaintiff's complaint."

He said that Servin wasn't abandoned in the orchard. One of the brothers first tried to revive Servin. Then they decided to take him to help because of poor phone reception in Vernalis. Not thinking clearly, they ended up taking Servin toward home, Perelman said.

"Mr. Servin wasn't just thrown by the side of the road," he said. "If somebody panicked and left him when police arrived, I don't know."

Perelman said California legislators crafted narrow laws addressing cases like this. To prove emotional distress, the person affected has to be present, unlike Servin's parents, who were far away in Mexico when their son died, he said.

For Gessell's part, he hopes that at the very least, companies doing business with General Pallet will become aware of what the owners did to Servin. Immigrant workers often don't know their rights, making them ripe for abuse, Gessell said.

"It's important for the rest of us to take note of these employers to prevent this type of thing from happening again," he said. "The employers are clearly not looking out for their employees. At least, not this employer."