Legal help
One of the social workers helping Carlitoss parents realised that the family faced an insurmountable financial burden and needed legal help. The social worker contacted a local lawyer, who confessed that he would have been completely over his head with such a complex case. He did, however, have a colleague who specialised in catastrophic personal injury, product liability, and medical malpractice litigation.
In his early forties at the time of Carlitoss birth in 2004, Yaffa is widely recognized as one of the top lawyers in the state. He has won many multimillion dollar settlements in cases tried before some of Floridas toughest judges. One of Yaffas competitors in Florida described him to me in an e-mail as 'a great lawyer...solid person...integrity...partner in a fabulous law firm...creative...innovative...bright...ethical...the works!'
Yaffa establishes an instant rapport, speaking with a soft, unwavering voice. When I asked him why he chose to take on such a long shot case as that of Carlitos Candelario, he eyed me the way he might stare at an uncooperative witness and said, 'I see a lot in my work. But when I see a child or a family that has been harmed and in distress, I dont need a whole lot more motivation than that.'
When Yaffa knocked on the door, Herrera answered. He was struck by the fact that the petite, round-faced woman was barely older than a child herself. All the men who lived in the trailer were in the fields. Carlitos was propped up in a baby seat. Strips of drying meat hung from a clothesline stretched across the living room, and the humid air was rank and pungent. Flies buzzed everywhere. When Carlitos began fussing, Herrera took the six-month-old baby out of the seat and laid him on the floor. An orphaned puppy that the trailers residents had adopted came bouncing around, and the child watched it, smiling and cooing.
'No arms, no legs'
The puppy yipped, pounced, and started nipping at the baby. Carlitos began to scream, and Herrera rushed to pick him up. Yaffa was powerfully affected. The child, who did not even have the ability to flick away a fly or push back against a puppy, faced a lifetime of need. 'The pesticides got into her system and affected this child that was forming and lo and behold, he ends up being born with no arms and no legs,' he told me.
When Herrera finally nodded her head, Yaffa vowed that he would do everything in his power to help his new client. But even a lawyer of his track record and courtroom acumen had his work cut out for him. Because of all the nearly infinite variablesheredity, exposure to chemicals at other job sites, possible smoking or drug abuse, environmental factorscases linking pesticide exposure to birth defects are notoriously hard to prove.
Instead of pursuing the conventional approach by trying to determine the chemical that caused the damage and suing the company that made it, Yaffa decided to do something he had never done: He would try to get compensation from the corporate farm where Herrera had worked. In essence, he would try the entire modern agricultural industry and the chemical-based philosophy on which it is founded.
