Toll now at 53 in San Antonio as families wait for answers
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — In the chaotic minutes after dozens of migrants were found dead inside a tractor-trailer sweltering under the Texas sun, the driver tried to slip away by pretending to be one of the survivors, a Mexican immigration official said Wednesday.
The driver along with two other men from Mexico remained in custody as the investigation continued into the tragedy that killed 53 people — the nation's deadliest smuggling episode on the U.S.-Mexico border.
They were among 67 people packed into the truck found abandoned Monday near auto salvage yards on the edge of San Antonio.
The victims included 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, said Francisco Garduño, chief of Mexico's National Immigration Institute.
Officials had potential identifications on 37 of the victims as of Wednesday morning, pending verification with authorities in other countries, according to the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office. Forty of the victims were male, it said.
Identifying the dead has been challenging because some were found without identification documents and in one case a stolen ID. Remote villages where some of the migrants came from in Mexico and Central America have no phone service to reach family members and fingerprint data has to be shared and matched by the governments involved.
The tragedy occurred at a time when huge numbers of migrants have been coming to the U.S., many of them taking perilous risks to cross swift rivers and canals and scorching desert landscapes. Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, up by one-third from a year ago.
While it's not clear when or where the migrants boarded the truck bound for San Antonio, Homeland Security investigators believe they got on near or in Laredo, on U.S. soil, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar told The Associated Press Wednesday.
The truck went through a Border Patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo on Interstate 35 on Monday, Cuellar and Mexican officials confirmed. The truck was registered in Alamo, Texas, but had fake plates and logos, Garduño said.