SURVIVING HORROR:
People were ‘crying and asking for water’
SAN ANTONIO — The smugglers assured the dozens of immigrants who piled into the tractortrailer in the border city of Laredo that the truck would have air conditioning, a necessity in the tripledigit summer heat.
But when the doors closed Saturday night, the container was already very hot and the people, who had crossed into the United States illegally, were thirsty and sweating, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday.
No food or water was provided to them, and people began to lose consciousness after the first hour of the 150-mile drive to San An-
tonio, several immigrants later told investigators. One person said at least 70 people had been packed into the trailer. Another said it could have been as many as 200.
They crowded around one small hole, taking turns gulping fresh air. They banged on the trailer’s walls but the truck didn’t stop.
By the time police discovered the human cargo — at an otherwise empty Walmart parking lot on the city’s southwest side after one man stumbled out and an employee called 911 — eight people were dead. Two more later died.
The details of the harsh conditions endured by the dozens of immigrants on their journey were revealed Monday in a criminal complaint against the truck’s driver, 60–year-old James Matthew Bradley Jr.
Bradley, of Louisville, Ky., faces up to life in prison or the death penalty on one count of transporting immigrants who are in the country illegally. He’s being held without bond until a bail hearing Thursday.
An affidavit for his arrest — sworn out by an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigative branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — described interviews with Bradley and several of the survivors.
Many immigrants were apparently picked up by smugglers before a Walmart employee called police. Of the 39 in and near the truck when police arrived, 31 were taken to area hospitals for treatment.
Driver’s story
Bradley told investigators he didn’t know there were people in the trailer and said he stopped in the Walmart parking lot to use the bathroom. When he got out of the truck, the trailer was shaking and people inside were banging on the walls.
“Bradley said he went to open the doors and was surprised when he was run over by ‘Spanish’ people and knocked to the ground,” ICE agent James Lara wrote in the complaint. “Bradley said he then noticed bodies just lying on the floor like meat. Bradley said he knew at least one of them was dead.”
Bradley was in the truck’s camper when police arrived, according to the complaint. The driver told investigators he called his wife, who didn’t answer, but didn’t call 911 after finding the stricken immigrants in the trailer, according to the complaint.
Bradley told police he had picked up the trailer in Iowa and was delivering it to Brownsville, 165 miles southeast of Laredo, where he had it detailed before driving to San Antonio.
He told police the truck’s refrigeration system was broken and the trailer’s four vents were likely clogged.
A different tale
The immigrants, however, described the stop at the San Antonio Walmart not as a chance for a bathroom break but the next step in a highly coordinated smuggling effort.
In Laredo, different groups of immigrants — a group of 28 from one smuggler and 24 from another — converged on the trailer Saturday morning, where they were ushered inside and the doors closed.
They wouldn’t leave until after 9 p.m., they said.
“The smugglers closed the door and the interior of the trailer was pitch black and it was already hot inside,” Lara wrote in the complaint. “(An immigrant) stated they were not provided with any water or food. People inside were making noise to get someone’s attention but nobody ever came.”
One immigrant from the Mexican state of Aguascalientes told investigators that he paid 11,000 pesos, a little more than $600, in protection money to the Zetas drug cartel and 1,500 pesos, about $80, to cross the river. He was told he’d have to pay another $5,500 when he reached San Antonio, where he planned to stay.
Another immigrant told agents he was traveling to San Antonio with seven family members. He spent 11 days in Laredo in a stash house before being loaded onto the trailer.
Yet another was going to Minnesota with his brother.
When they reached San Antonio, the immigrant from Aguascalientes told investigators six black SUVs were waiting and left within minutes, full of immigrants. Before leaving Laredo, the smugglers had handed out differently colored strips of tape to each group, so they knew who to leave with upon arrival in San Antonio.
Complex operation
Such a sophisticated smuggling system is “not unusual at all,” said Julian Calderas, the former deputy field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations branch in San Antonio.
“They are very sophisticated,” Calderas said of the smuggling organizations. “It’s a several-step process, from the time they get them across the border on foot, they stage them in a stash house and then stage them for the potential transport. There are people involved at each one of those stages, and it requires a lot of logistics.”
Nor is it unusual for the Zetas to charge protection money for crossing the Rio Grande in regions they control, he said.
“They’re very territorial, and those smuggling routes are very lucrative,” Calderas said. “That’s why they’re battling over them all them time. If you’re using those roads and you’re going north, whether it’s drugs, smuggled humans or legitimate commerce, everybody’s got to pay.”
Another survivor from Aguascalientes, Adan Lalravega, told The Associated Press that he and six friends left behind a region of Mexico without any employment opportunities. He said the group waited nearly two weeks in a Laredo safe house. They were told they would be traveling “in a refrigerator, a refrigerator with air. But that didn’t happen.”
“After an hour I heard crying — people crying and asking for water. I, too, was sweating and people were despairing,” Lalravega said Monday from his bed in a San Antonio hospital. “That’s when I lost consciousness.”
Late Monday, a pair of men who had been among those transported quietly appeared for a hearing in federal court in San Antonio.
The men, both from Mexico, were held as material witnesses and will give a videotaped statement about the matter.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Chestney appointed lawyers for the pair.
“We are never going to face the accused, are we?” one of them asked.
Chestney replied that he would have to speak to his lawyer about that.