CLAIM FILED OVER DEA BORDER SHOOTING

SAN ANTONIO (AP) The family of an 18-year-old Mexican man shot in
the back by a drug task force officer as he crossed the Rio Grande
last month is seeking $25 million from the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration.

A bullet struck Abecnego Monje Ortiz between the shoulder blades as he
ran through a rural area of Maverick County on Jan. 25, leaving him
paralyzed. He had just crossed the river in an inner tube with about
14 other people.

"I crossed the border in order to seek work in the United States,
carrying nothing more than a jug of water," Monje says in the claim,
which was filed as the first step toward a possible lawsuit. "At the
moment I was shot, I was running in the opposite direction from the
man who shot me."

Wilbur Honeycutt, an officer assigned full-time to a multiagency drug
task force of the DEA, shot Monje about 13 miles north of Eagle Pass,
according to the DEA.

The FBI, the Maverick County Sheriff's Office and the Department of
Public Safety are investigating. But authorities declined to say if
Honeycutt was on or off duty at the time of the shooting, or to
provide more details before the inquiry is complete.

The area around Eagle Pass has been designated a "High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area," where agencies are trying to stop undocumented
immigrants and drugs from entering the country.

The shooting happened less than two years after the fatal shooting of
18- year-old Esequiel Hernandez near Redford along the West Texas
border. The teen- ager was herding his family's goats when a U.S.
Marine in an anti-drug patrol shot him to death.

Amid a national outcry over the 1997 shooting, the Pentagon suspended
armed military patrols on the Southwest border. To settle a claim
filed by Hernandez's survivors, the government bought a $1 million
annuity for the family.