3 Killed as Van Fleeing Border Patrol Crashes

Three people were killed and 14 injured early Wednesday when a van loaded with suspected illegal aliens crashed during a high-speed chase with U.S. Border Patrol agents near the Imperial County town of Ocotillo, authorities said.

The van carrying 19 passengers was being chased by agents along a deserted stretch of Interstate 8 about 2 a.m. when the driver tried to make a sharp right turn onto Dunaway Road, said Richard Morrissey, assistant chief of the Border Patrol. The van went down a 20-foot embankment and overturned several times.

Morrissey said he believes the passengers paid a professional smuggler to get them into the United States, and that they may have been on the last leg of the trip when the crash occurred.

Two men who were slightly injured were held for questioning at a Border Patrol station in El Centro, but agents were unable to learn who is operating the smuggling ring, Morrissey said.

“When you are moving that amount of people it’s not a mom-and-pop operation,” Morrissey said. “Sometimes the people won’t tell you who they paid and sometimes they don’t know.”

About half of the passengers were carrying Salvadoran or Guatemalan passports, he said. He speculated that the passengers may have paid from $250 to $300 each to be smuggled into the country.

The van, bearing California license plates, was traced to an El Cajon address, Morrissey said. The address is that of a former owner of the van who is not a suspect in the case.

The Border Patrol gave the following account of the events leading up to the accident:

After ground sensors along the border indicated that several people were moving on foot toward Meyer Wash, a small town near Ocotillo, agents were dispatched to Meyer Wash where they saw a red-and-white Ford van parked beside Interstate 8. Ocotillo is about 65 miles from San Diego.

The driver of the van told the agents he had stopped to rest. The agents, suspicious of the man’s story, went east on Interstate 8 to wait for the van to pull away.

When the van passed their patrol car several minutes later, the officers turned on flashing lights, but the driver refused to pull over.

After another patrol car joined the chase, the driver of the van tried twice to force that car off the road. The 13-mile chase reached speeds of 80 m.p.h., ending when the driver tried to turn off the highway in an attempt to lose the agents.

“The (border) agents exercised very good judgment” in chasing the van, Dale Musegates, chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector, told the Associated Press. “There is just no way to keep someone from driving off the edge.”

The Imperial County coroner’s office identified one of the three victims killed in the crash as Robert Alexander Guevara, 19, of El Salvador.

The other two victims were a 33-year-old woman who has several Los Angeles addresses, and a 20-year-old man from Mexicali, Mexico, believed to be the driver. Their names will be released upon notification of relatives, Deputy Coroner David Corn said.

Ten of the survivors were at El Centro Community Hospital, all with multiple fractures and internal injuries, nursing supervisor Margaret Riddle said.