Human Trafficking Tragedy With Eight Found Dead in Trailer Outside Walmart

By Associated Press

23 July 17

 

ight people were found dead in a tractor-trailer loaded outside a Walmart store in the stifling summer heat of Texas, in what police said was a horrific human trafficking case. The driver was arrested.

Twenty other people in extremely critical or serious condition and eight more with lesser injuries including heat stroke and dehydration were found inside the truck, which did not have a working air conditioning system despite blistering temperatures that topped 100F (37C), authorities said.

Store surveillance video showed vehicles had arrived and picked up other people from the tractor-trailer, police said. All the survivors were taken to several hospitals.

“They were very hot to the touch,” said San Antonio fire chief Charles Hood, briefing journalists at the scene in video that authorities posted on social media. “So these people were in this trailer without any signs of any type of water. It was a mass casualty situation for us.

“We are very fortunate that there weren’t 38 people who were locked inside of this vehicle dead.”

San Antonio-based US attorney Richard Durbin said those responsible for the deaths were “ruthless human smugglers indifferent to the well-being of their fragile cargo”, who he said were victims of a “smuggling venture gone horribly wrong”.

Federal investigators will work with San Antonio police to identify those responsible, Durbin said.

Late on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning, police said, a person from the truck approached a Walmart employee in a parking lot and asked for water. The employee gave the person the water and then called police. When officers arrived they found the eight people dead in the back of the trailer and 30 survivors inside, police chief William McManus said.

McManus did not release the driver’s identity.

“We’re looking at a human trafficking crime this evening,” McManus said, adding that many of those inside the truck appeared to be adults in their 20s and 30s but there were also apparently two school-age children. He called the case “a horrific tragedy”.

Police later said part of the federal Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, was taking the lead in the case and would issue all further updates.

After daybreak on Sunday, the truck remained at the side and towards the back of the store. The scene was marked off with yellow crime-scene tape and by officers and patrol cars. The trailer of the 18-wheeler truck had an Iowa license plate. Neither it nor the truck’s cab appeared to have markings.

The National Weather Service’s local office said the temperature in San Antonio hit 101F just before 5pm on Saturday and didn’t dip below 90F (32C) until after 10pm.

Other cases of human trafficking in the US have led to more deaths. In May 2003, 19 immigrants being transported from south Texas to Houston died inside a sweltering tractor-trailer.

Prosecutors said the driver in the 2003 case heard the immigrants begging and screaming for their lives as they were succumbing to the stifling heat inside his truck but refused to free them. The driver was re-sentenced in 2011 to nearly 34 years in prison, after a federal appeals court overturned the multiple life sentences he had received.

US Border Patrol has reported at least four truck seizures this month in and around Laredo, a border city about 150 miles south-west of San Antonio. On 7 July, agents found 72 people crammed into a truck “with no means of escape”, the agency said. The people were from Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Authorities in Mexico have made a number of discoveries of large numbers of people being trafficked in such vehicles in dangerous conditions. Last December, Mexican officials found 110 migrants trapped and suffocating inside a truck after it crashed while speeding in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, which is a main migration corridor for Central Americans heading to the US.

Most of the migrants were from Central America, and 48 were minors. Some were injured in the crash but there were no fatalities.

Last October, also in Veracruz state, four migrants suffocated in a truck that was carrying 55 people, most from Guatemala. Many survivors were found to be severely dehydrated and had not had food or water for several days.

The migrants were locked in the back of a truck that was made to look as if it belonged to the Mexican mail service, according to immigration officials, who added that the migrants had paid about $930 apiece to be smuggled from Guatemala to the US border.

Traffickers sometimes use smaller vehicles. In August 2016 a van carrying 26 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala turned over in the northern Mexican border state of Nuevo Leon, killing five.