Lawyers say driver doesn’t deserve death
Attorneys argue that he didn’t intend to kill immigrants in trailer he hauled from Mexico
A lawyer for a trucker charged with illegally transporting dozens of migrants resulting in 10 deaths said Wednesday that his legal team plans to fight to keep prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against him.
And just days after the tragic incident landed James Matthew Bradley Jr. in handcuffs and the international spotlight, Border Patrol agents rescued 12 migrants concealed in a trailer that tried to make it through the same checkpoint where Bradley’s rig had reportedly passed inspection on Saturday night.
The rescued immigrants, from Honduras and Guatemala, were found upon a secondary inspection, and the temperature in the trailer was registered at 109 degrees, the Border Patrol said in a news release. The driver, a United States citizen whose name was not released, was arrested.
Meanwhile, Maureen Franco, the federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, said Bradley, of Kentucky and Florida, is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
‘Death-eligible case’
“He didn’t intend to allegedly kill anyone, so (the death penalty) is not an appropriate punishment,” said Franco of El Paso, whose district stretches along the border from that city to San Antonio, and north to Waco.
Away from the crush of cameras and reporters that overwhelmed Bradley’s initial appearance earlier this week, Franco and one of her assistant public defenders, Alfredo Villarreal, quietly met with Bradley on Wednesday at the federal courthouse, instead of in jail.
They began what will be a long legal process to persuade local federal prosecutors that they should not advise their bosses in Washington that Bradley should be punished with death. Franco said another lawyer with death penalty defense experience, Oregon assistant federal public defender Kim Stevens, will assist Villarreal in defending Bradley.
“It’s a death-eligible case,” Franco said. “Whether or not (prosecutors) seek the death penalty is a decision to be made by the attorney general, who is currently Jeff Sessions.”
In nearby holding cells of the courthouse, federal prosecutors processed nine of the 13 witnesses they have lined up so far to testify against Bradley, who has told law enforcement that he did not know there were dozens of immigrants in the sweltering trailer he was towing before he parked his tractor-trailer next to a Walmart on San Antonio’s southwest side, along Interstate 35, on Saturday night.
By the time police responded to the scene early Sunday, only 39 of the immigrants were left as several had fled or were picked up by unknown sport-utility vehicles. Eight were dead at the scene, and two more have since died.
Most were from Mexico
Of the 39 people found abandoned, at least 34 were Mexicans who came from about a dozen states including 14 people from the central state of Aguascalientes, the Mexican government announced Wednesday. And of the 10 dead, at least seven were Mexican.
In a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Reyna Torres Mendivil, the Mexican consul general in San Antonio, said efforts to identify two of the dead continue.
“The most important thing is to identify the bodies. You can imagine how difficult this is. We are also in the process of contacting relatives in Mexico and the U.S. We are helping them with the repatriation of the bodies,” she said.
The consul said that many calls have been received from family members searching for missing persons, and that the consul has assured them that they will be allowed to visit victims still in the hospital or try to identify the dead without fear of being detained or deported.
“We have been in touch with U.S. authorities, and anyone who is accompanied by a consular official will not be questioned about their status. They will be given access,” she said.
Torres said that while at least 14 of the people found in the trailer are in the custody of the U.S. Marshal Service, some are being held as potential witnesses. None so far have been deported, she said.