Trapped in Trailer, 18 Migrants Die

Eighteen illegal immigrants died after they were crammed into a stifling trailer without food or water and abandoned at a remote truck stop in South Texas, officials said Wednesday. The victims included a 5-year-old boy who died in the arms of his father.

In all, as many as 140 people -- men, women, children and infants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras -- had been packed into a nondescript white tractor-trailer.

Late Tuesday, while the truck rumbled across southwestern Texas, the migrants inside had grown so desperate for air that they clawed through the trailer’s insulation and ripped through its metal shell. One investigator said adults took turns holding the boy up to one hole so he could breathe in a futile attempt to keep him alive.

Early Wednesday, authorities who went to the truck stop found the bodies of 13 people inside the trailer; the bodies of four others were found on the pavement nearby. The victims all apparently suffocated. A 91-year-old man removed from the trailer arrived at an emergency room in full cardiac arrest and died minutes later, officials said.

Forty-four survivors, including 16 taken to two area hospitals, had been found by Wednesday night, some while recuperating on a nearby creek bank. Two people remained in critical condition and were being treated in the intensive care unit at Victoria’s DeTar Hospital.

Hospital spokesman Jerrel Robinowich said some victims arrived at the emergency room with a body temperature of 105 degrees -- after a 20-minute ride in an air-conditioned ambulance.

“It was a terrible sight to see,” Carlos Garcia, an official with the Mexican Consulate in Houston, said after leaving the scene. “Awful. Sick.”

Law enforcement officials had missed several opportunities to rescue the immigrants.

The truck is believed to have made it past a border checkpoint Tuesday night in Texas shortly after the migrants climbed aboard, officials said. At 11:42 p.m., someone inside the trailer called 911 with a cell phone. “We’re suffocating!” one of them shouted. But the call got cut off while dispatchers searched for someone who spoke Spanish. Twenty minutes later, a motorist called the police in Kingsville to warn it about the truck.

The motorist told a police dispatcher that someone had broken out a taillight on the truck, had thrust his hand through the hole and was waving a bandanna in a clear sign of distress. The dispatcher did not pass the information along to law enforcement agencies north of Kingsville, nor to the Texas Highway Patrol, Kingsville Police Chief Sam Granato acknowledged.

“The dispatcher did not take the caller very seriously,” he said in an interview. “Only when the Teletype came in at 3:42 a.m. from Victoria did they put two and two together. In hindsight, it hit ‘em.”

The trailer was insulated for refrigeration, but an attached ventilation system was either broken or was not turned on, said Victoria County Sheriff Mike Ratcliff. Without adequate ventilation, investigators said, the insulation essentially worked backward: As temperatures hovered in the mid-90s on Tuesday, the insulation trapped hot air in the trailer, causing the temperature inside to soar.

As many as 80 other members of the group spilled out of the truck and sprinted for the woods when Victoria County sheriff’s deputies, alerted by a call to 911 from a truck stop cashier, arrived early Wednesday. Those people were still on the run by nightfall, police said.

The migrants are believed to have crossed illegally into the U.S. in small groups earlier this week, then assembled at a safe house in Harlingen, Texas, just across the border, a common practice during smuggling operations. They are believed to have boarded the truck in nearby San Benito, Texas, Granato said, then headed northeast toward Houston on U.S. 77. The truck stop is on the western side of 77, south of Victoria.

The group included a large number of men from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato who were seeking work, officials said.

Federal officials took a Schenectady, N.Y., resident, identified as Tyrone Williams, into custody in the Houston suburb of Bellaire. Williams, a commercial truck driver, was arrested but had not been charged, and his role in the incident remained unclear. He was apparently in the cab hauling the trailer until the trailer was unhitched and abandoned at the truck stop early Wednesday, authorities said.

The trailer was registered in Williams’ name and carried New York license plates, officials said. Authorities said they were still searching for a man and a woman who were believed to have organized the smuggling operation.

Saying they wanted to protect the integrity of the investigation, officials declined to say why the driver or drivers abandoned the trailer at the truck stop. Authorities also declined to reveal whether the migrants broke out themselves or whether the drivers or sheriff’s deputies opened the back of the truck, which had been locked.

Local, state and federal authorities descended on -- and overwhelmed -- Victoria, a city of about 60,000 nestled among oil fields and ranches still named after their cattle brands, such as the Bar H. The city is known as the “Crossroads of South Texas” because it lies at the center of an imaginary square whose corners are Corpus Christi, Austin, San Antonio and Houston -- where the immigrants were headed.

“I have never seen something like this,” said Elsa Garza, 39, a Victoria homemaker who was one of scores of residents who flocked to the truck stop and spent Wednesday gazing at the abandoned trailer from behind yellow police tape. “These are illegal people coming to the United States thinking they are going to find a better life. And look what they found: Death.”

As the sun began to dip, workers in blue suits and face shields backed a second truck into the alley where the trailer was parked. They began removing black body bags one at a time and placing them into the second truck to take them away.

“Pitiful,” said Pedro Trevino, 61, as he watched from the parking lot. “I know the Border Patrol is doing the best they can. But something is wrong.”

Indeed, reaction to the incident was swift and furious.

Many officials placed blame for the incident squarely -- and solely -- on the shoulders of the smugglers. Victoria County Dist. Atty. M.P. “Dexter” Eaves promised that his prosecutors would bring “every ounce of justice” to the case, and he suggested that those responsible could face the death penalty.

“The heartless criminals will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Asa Hutchinson, the new border and transportation security chief. “This grim discovery is a horrific reminder of the callous disregard smugglers have for their human cargo.”

But the issue is far more complex than that, said Claudia Smith, border project director for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. Smith contends that the United States’ “dysfunctional immigration policy” -- including the fact that the federal government cracks down on border crossings, but not on businesses that use migrant labor -- must share the blame.

Immigration experts said Wednesday that crossing the border became considerably harder after the U.S. government added hundreds of Border Patrol agents, bolstered by stadium-style lights and high-tech night-vision goggles, in selected regions during the 1990s.

That effort, begun in the San Diego and El Paso areas, was expanded later to other regions, including a crackdown called Operation Rio Grande along the Texas border.

The increased enforcement has, in many cases, led immigrants to take bigger risks, such as crossing deserts and cramming into car trunks and the bodies of trucks.

“I am no apologist for smugglers. It is not a humanitarian enterprise,” Smith said.

“But the smugglers’ role in this does not absolve us for our role in this tragedy. These operations have made smugglers indispensable. People desperate for work are going to take enormous chances to go where the jobs are. And we keep giving them jobs. At an enormous cost in human life, all we have done is give an appearance of control along the border.”

It remains unclear what the future holds for the survivors.

Eaves and other authorities said discussion is underway about whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States or whether they will be deported to their home countries. Michael Shelby, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Texas, pointed out that the survivors -- although he was sympathetic to their plight -- are in the United States illegally.

He encouraged them to turn themselves in.

“There are a lot of people that want to come to America,” Eaves said. “And I can’t blame them for that.”

In Mexico, President Vicente Fox sent condolences to the families of the dead. He instructed the Mexican consulate in Houston to cooperate with U.S. authorities to help identify the traffickers responsible for the deaths.

Fox has lobbied unsuccessfully for changes in American law that would make it easier for Mexicans to migrate legally to work in the United States. In a brief message Wednesday, Fox’s office condemned the trafficking of illegal migrants and called for “the most severe punishment” for the smugglers.

The number of deaths Wednesday matched the toll from the nation’s deadliest incident involving undocumented border crossers.

In 1987, 18 people were found dead in a railroad boxcar near the border in the West Texas town of Sierra Blanca. A survivor said the group had been locked inside amid searing heat.

More recently, in May 2001, 14 people died hiking across the desert near Yuma, Ariz., after their guides apparently became lost in the huge expanse.

And in October, 11 bodies, severely decomposed, were found in a railroad car in Denison, Iowa.

Times staff writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Richard Boudreaux and researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.