Seventeen people were found dead when authorities opened up a sweltering, airless trailer abandoned at a South Texas truck stop with more than 100 illegal immigrants locked inside.
An 18th victim died later Wednesday at a hospital in one of the deadliest smuggling attempts on record in the US.
The men, women and children from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were apparently so desperate for air that they tried to claw through insulation on the back door. At least one of those trapped inside placed a desperate call to police late Tuesday, saying people were suffocating and pleading with a dispatcher to "help me."
When sheriff's deputies opened the trailer at about 2am, "a flood of human beings" spilled out, US attorney Michael Shelby said. Many ran off, but others were too weak to go far.
Thirteen bodies were found inside the trailer and four more on the ground just outside. A five or six-year-old boy was among the dead.
Authorities said one of three suspected smugglers was arrested Wednesday in the Houston area, about 185km northeast of Victoria. The man, one Tyrone Williams of New York, was not immediately charged.
The trailer is registered in Williams' name and had New York plates, Shelby said. Authorities were still looking for two more suspects whose names were not released.
The smugglers apparently unhitched the trailer at the truck stop near Victoria, about 281km from the Mexican border, and drove off. Insulation around several small holes in the back door was scraped away, suggesting the immigrants had tried to get out.
Someone inside the trailer also telephoned authorities, pleading for help. The 911 call to police in Kingsville, 160km south of Victoria, came in just before midnight Tuesday from a Spanish speaker on a cellular phone with lots of yelling and background noise.
Police Chief Sam Granato said 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 asphyxiating.
Granato said someone traveling on US Highway 77 called police to report seeing a hand waving a bandanna out of a hole in the back of a white 18-wheeler truck with New York plates at a truck stop.
It was the deadliest immigrant-smuggling attempt in the US 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.
Mexican President Vicente Fox's office issued a statement mourning the deaths and expressing his condolences to the victims' families.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS