A Hopeful Journey Turns Toward Terror

The 18-wheeler pulled off the desert highway and rumbled down a pockmarked clay road, its headlights raking a desolate hamlet of double-wides.

The big rig, making an unscheduled detour at the start of a midnight run from El Paso to Dallas, slowed as it approached a dingy mobile home. Then the headlights snapped off. It turned through a gap in a chain-link fence and backed in close to the house.

Jason Sprague climbed down from the cab and swung open the trailer’s heavy cargo doors. Then he headed inside for his money.

That’s when he saw them. Under a faint ceiling lamp, dozens of ragged people waited silently in two lines. Some clasped small bags; others had only the clothes on their backs.

Sprague hurried past and stepped into the bathroom where a woman was waiting. She handed him an envelope bulging with $3,000. “You’ll get the rest when it’s completed,” she told him.

Sprague settled back into the driver’s seat as the woman and her partner loaded the human cargo.

He had been told that there would be 32 of them -- illegal immigrants who had made it across the Rio Grande to this drop house 20 miles from El Paso. Now they had to be smuggled past an internal Border Patrol highway checkpoint and dropped off at a truck stop in Dallas.

As they clambered into the freight compartment, Sprague felt the rig rock. How many people were they stuffing back there?

“Uno por uno,” the loaders hissed. One by one. Walk fast.

In the line, inching forward, Luciano Alcocer smiled, grateful to be moving again.

Eight days earlier, the carpenter from Mexico City had kissed his wife and daughters goodbye. Don’t cry, he told his children as their eyes filled; this could be our salvation.

The companies that once bought the tables and desks Alcocer built had shut down, but there was work in the United States. A relative sent about $1,500 to the smugglers and gave Alcocer a number to call once he reached the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez.

Alcocer, 41, met a guide who led him across the Rio Grande. In El Paso, a car picked him up.

For days, he’d hidden inside the crowded mobile home. Now, half-past midnight on July 27, 2002, carrying only his hopes and a couple of T-shirts, he climbed a stepladder propped against the truck’s open freight compartment.

It was dark in there, and cramped.

The 53-foot-long aluminum-walled trailer, lined with plywood, was packed with cardboard boxes of medical supplies. Alcocer crawled three-quarters of the way in, settling atop a box on the driver’s side. Others silently climbed inside -- about 40 people in all. Another seven or so, all women and children, piled into the sleeping compartment behind the cab.

Alcocer watched the shadowy outlines of the passengers filing in.

There was Jose Gaston Ramirez, 59, a shoemaker from Cuernavaca, looking very American in a red Calvin Klein T-shirt. He was bound for Chicago to reunite with his daughter.

Edson Rojas, a tall, skinny 16-year-old heading from Mexico City to join his father in Kansas, claimed a spot.

“Silencio!” the loaders ordered. Especially at the Border Patrol checkpoint, everyone must be silent.

With that, the heavy doors closed and everything went black. To Alcocer, it was as if the doors were closing on an old life of despair. Later, he would invoke a different metaphor: Las puertas a la muerte.

The doors to death.

The engine roared to life, and the truck began to roll.

It was the beginning of an American journey that thousands of illegal immigrants make. But this one would end almost a year and a half later -- in a federal courtroom.

*

It was nearly 4 a.m. when Sprague picked up his co-driver, Troy Dock, in El Paso. Dock, 30, had made smuggling runs before, but this was Sprague’s first. With Dallas still at least 10 hours away, Sprague, 27, wondered if they should call the whole thing off.

But there was money to be made -- another $1,200 after the migrants were dropped off.

Dock drove on; Sprague dozed.

They’d just been hired as a driving team for Boyd Logistics Inc. of El Paso when Dock’s contact in Ciudad Juarez, Pat Valdes, called to say that he had a load that was ready to move.

Now, as they rolled down Interstate 10, Dock’s cellphone kept ringing. It was Valdes, checking their progress, asking if they’d made it through the checkpoint yet.

Ninety minutes east of El Paso, they drew near the checkpoint at Sierra Blanca, one of a network intended to intercept illegal immigrants and drugs moving north from the border.

In the freight compartment, the illegal immigrants passed the time talking in hushed voices, always in Spanish. Alcocer listened politely as an Argentine barber boasted of plans to ply his trade in Los Angeles.

“Tengo sed,” someone said. I’m thirsty. One of the men used the illuminated dial of his wristwatch to locate a water jug.

Sometime before sunrise, Alcocer felt the truck slow. The checkpoint, he figured. Everyone fell silent.

But a thought was nagging him: The smugglers had promised that the trailer would be air-conditioned, but it was stuffy. Was any air getting in?

Dock pulled the rig behind a line of trucks moving slowly past the checkpoint. The routine was like Russian roulette. Some trucks were stopped and searched, others waved through. Dock was pushing his luck; twice before he’d made it through with loads of illegal passengers.

His stomach knotted. But even before he came to a complete stop, the agent waved him on by.

Half an hour down the road, Dock pulled into a truck stop to get a drink. When he swung back on the interstate, the sun was just coming up. It was still 7 1/2 hours to Dallas.

Inside the freight compartment, Alcocer licked a finger and held it up to see if he could feel any air moving. Nothing.

Slivers of morning light squeezed through the seals of the trailer doors. The temperature outside was rising, headed toward 95 degrees.

Rojas, the 16-year-old, stripped off his shirt. Alcocer did the same.

He grew very thirsty, but there was no water left in the jugs. They were urinals now.

“No hay aire,” a woman said softly. There’s no air.

The word spread quickly. No hay aire, other travelers murmured. Suddenly a young man vomited.

Alcocer heard ripping. Others were tearing flaps from the packing boxes and using them to fan themselves. Alcocer snatched off a piece and waved it furiously.

The effort exhausted him.

Digging through the boxes, someone pulled out some plastic tube. Others tugged away the gummy seals around the trailer doors in search of an airway, then forced one end of a tube through the crevice and tried to breathe through the other.

Nothing.

One traveler began tearing at the plywood on the trailer walls, slicing his fingers. Alcocer tried to help, and they managed to break off a few pieces, only to expose the trailer’s aluminum walls.

How do we make a hole? someone said.

The barber, Alcocer thought. He must have scissors!

“No, my friend,” the barber said. His kit was too expensive.

Suddenly, all eyes were on him in the dim light.

“Give them to me,” Alcocer demanded.

A man grabbed the scissors and stabbed the aluminum walls again and again, gouging a couple of small holes before the scissors bent uselessly.

The temperature inside the freight compartment kept climbing. Later, police would estimate that it reached 150 degrees.

“I’m thirsty,” Alcocer cried.

Someone passed him a jug. He knew what was in it, but what choice did he have? He drank.

Up in the cab, the roar of the engine drowned out the noise from the cargo hold. Sprague and Dock drove on, oblivious. Cruising through the blazing prairie outside Odessa, they popped a Garth Brooks recording into the tape player and switched on the cab’s air conditioner.

Back in the trailer, their passengers were swinging their arms wildly -- pounding the walls, the doors, the ceiling. The sound was booming, but in Alcocer’s oxygen-deprived state, it seemed oddly muffled.

Hyperventilating, a teenage girl crawled toward the doors and screamed, “Call 911! Call anybody!”

In the gloom, Alcocer watched Jose Gaston Ramirez lie down on the boxes. Back in the mobile home, he had snored when he slept, but he wasn’t making a sound now.

Another migrant, 28-year-old Pioquinto Cabrera of Veracruz, crawled by clutching a jug of urine. Alcocer asked for another drink. No, Cabrera said. It’s for one of the ladies.

One man peeled off his shirt, put it in his mouth and tried to suck out the sweat.

Soon, the hallucinations started. A helicopter is flying overhead! someone shouted. The police are following! cried another. But none of it was so.

No quiero morir, someone whimpered. I don’t want to die.

Alcocer whispered a prayer. “I’m in your hands, God. Take care of my family.”

Then his head lolled back, and he closed his eyes.

Next week: The truck drivers open the doors to horror.

*

The Sources for This Story

The scenes inside the truck cab are based on jailhouse interviews with Troy Dock and Jason Sprague, on transcripts and videos of their police interrogations, and on court testimony of migrants who rode in the sleeping compartment. The description of the loading is from interviews with Sprague and migrant Luciano Alcocer, and on the testimony of other migrants. The movements of the truck come from the drivers and from the vehicle’s Global Positioning System, obtained from court records. The scenes inside the trailer are from interviews with migrants, including Alcocer, and from the testimony of 10 other migrants. The migrants’ backgrounds come from interviews with them and investigators, and from medical records, death certificates and court testimony. The direct quotes appear as they are remembered by those who spoke or heard them.