Offer by Carlsbad Couple to Adopt 6 Orphans Rejected

MEXICO CITY —  Six Mexican orphans whose mother died in a hit-and-run accident in San Diego have been taken back to their homeland after their grandfather, an illiterate farmhand, rejected a Carlsbad family’s offer to adopt them.

“We don’t want to go,” 13-year-old Guadalupe Martinez said Friday, moments before Mexican consular officials in San Diego came to take them away.

The two girls and four boys, aged 1 to 13, arrived at Mexico City airport later Friday, accompanied by Alfredo Martinez, 54, their maternal grandfather.

The children refused to answer reporters’ questions.

“They are not well. They do not want to talk,” Martinez explained.

He said he was taking them to Zamora, in the Pacific coast state of Michoacan, but refused to say more.

Martinez told reporters in San Diego that he was a farmhand in Zamora and lived in a straw house beside a plot where he grows onions, radishes and potatoes.

Martinez, who said he is illiterate, used his thumbprint to sign a document saying he wanted the children to return with him.

Mexico welfare authorities were to determine who will be named legal guardian.

Luz Maria Martinez, their 32-year-old pregnant mother, a hotel maid in San Diego County, was killed in a hit-and-run accident April 4 and the fate of the children had remained uncertain.

A seventh child, Jose Manuel Martinez, 14, has been missing since he ran away soon after the accident.

Dennis and Jeanne Meehan, a Carlsbad couple, offered to take care of them, and the children apparently were willing to stay.

Dennis Meehan is a real estate agent and tax preparer, and four of their five children are grown and have left their large home.

“We wanted to offer the children the opportunity to stay here as a family,” he said.

“We didn’t know exactly how we were going to meet expenses, but we were willing to assure it would be done without any burden to the state.”

U.S. immigration officials similarly said they were ready to stay the children’s deportation if a responsible local family was willing to become their guardians.

But the Mexican Consulate in San Diego managed to contact grandfather Martinez, and brought him up from Mexico to take charge of the orphans.

“Children who are available for adoption are those who don’t have any families or those whose families reject them. That’s not the case here,” Mexican Consul Graciela Merino told reporters in San Diego.

Earlier, after visiting the Meehan home, Martinez verbally agreed to let them stay, the San Diego Union reported.

He later changed his mind, saying one of his daughters asked him to bring the children home to Mexico.