VICTORIA, Texas — 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.
