How To Prevent This From Happening Again?

Truck driver charged after 18 people die after beind locked in trailer

By T.A. Badger,

Associated Press, 5/15/2003 08:59


VICTORIA, Texas (AP) Locked inside the back of a sweltering, airless semitrailer, a large group of illegal immigrants tried desperately to save themselves.

One dialed 911 on a cell phone and pleaded for help in Spanish. But by the time a South Texas police dispatcher found someone to translate, the call had been lost.

Minutes later, one hung a bandanna out of a hole in the trailer's back door as it sped north on U.S. Highway 77. Another motorist saw the signal, but his mobile phone wasn't working, so he couldn't call authorities in time.

When the trailer's door was opened early Wednesday, 17 people in the illicit cargo had lost their lives in one of the deadliest cases of human smuggling in U.S. history. Another died several hours later.

''This is a serious, serious crime,'' Bob Wallis, the region's top immigration official, said Wednesday at the truck stop outside Victoria, where sheriff's deputies made the gruesome discovery.

A federal complaint filed Thursday charged the truck's driver, Tyrone Williams of Schenectady, N.Y., with transporting and harboring aliens and conspiracy to transport and harbor aliens, Victoria County District Attorney M.P. ''Dexter'' Eaves told The Associated Press.

He said Williams would go before a federal magistrate in Houston Thursday. Two other people believed to have accompanied Williams were also sought, with the possibility of other suspects to be identified.

Williams' wife, Karen, told the Houston Chronicle in a story for its online edition that her husband normally hauls watermelons from the border to the Northeast. She said he told her the trailer was hijacked and that he dropped the trailer ''for his own safety and ran.''

Williams likely will also face state charges, Eaves said Thursday.

''We want to get every bit of justice for these guys,'' he said. ''I want this insurance for these 18 people that they did not die in vain. I want an accounting.''

Thirteen bodies were found inside the trailer Wednesday morning and four others were on the ground just outside. A boy, 5 or 6 years old, was among the dead.

The smugglers apparently unhitched the trailer at the Victoria truck stop, about 175 miles from the Mexican border, and drove off. Insulation around several small holes in the back door was scraped away, suggesting the immigrants from Mexico and Central America had tried to claw their way to more air.

''In desperation, the people said they broke out the truck's taillights, to try and attract someone's attention and perhaps get some air,'' said Marco Nunez, press officer for Eduardo Ibarrola, Mexico's consul in Houston. Ibarrola interviewed some of the survivors.

Some of the victims were said to have torn off their clothes because of the unbearable heat.

The 911 call came in to police in Kingsville, 100 miles south of Victoria, just before midnight Tuesday from a Spanish speaker on a cellular phone. There was lots of yelling and background noise.

Police Chief Sam Granato said the dispatcher passed the call to someone who spoke Spanish, but the call was cut off and the number couldn't be traced. But after listening to a digital recording, Granato said police were able to hear the man saying that people were suffocating.

''He kept saying that over and over again,'' said Granato, adding that the man also said ''help me'' and ''there's nine down.''

Granato said someone traveling on the highway called police to report seeing a hand waving a bandanna out of a hole in the back of a white 18-wheeler with New York plates. Granato said it wasn't until a teletype came in from Victoria on Wednesday afternoon about the white 18-wheeler that dispatchers connected the calls.

It was the deadliest immigrant-smuggling attempt in the United States in more than 15 years. In 1987, the Border Patrol found 18 Mexican immigrants dead in a boxcar left on a rail siding in the West Texas town of Sierra Blanca.

Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Homeland Security Department, said the federal agency would help catch those involved.

The trailer had arrived at the truck stop about an hour before authorities got a call about an unspecified disturbance there around 2 a.m., Victoria County Sheriff Michael Ratcliff said.

Some of the 39 survivors in U.S. custody told consular officials sent to interview them that smugglers had loaded them aboard the trailer Tuesday in Harlingen, Texas.

While the trailer was being pulled apparently toward Houston the refrigerated truck's air conditioning worked well. But when the driver unhooked his cab and abandoned the trailer, the cramped container quickly became an airless tomb.

The ''vast majority'' of the immigrants are from Mexico, though there are also people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, Nunez said.

Michael Shelby, U.S. attorney in Houston, said more than 100 people had been packed into the trailer.

Ratcliff said four of them were hospitalized in Victoria with heat-related injuries, while another 40 were staying at a temporary shelter in the city. He said authorities bought a cake for a 15-year-old girl who was rescued on her birthday.

Jerrel Robinowich, spokesman for DeTar Hospital Navarro, said the trailer had little or no ventilation ''and you can just imagine the consequences of that.''

The National Weather Service said it was 74 degrees with 93 percent humidity at 2 a.m. Wednesday. The high Tuesday was 91, one degree shy of a record for the date.


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