8 dead in Wal-Mart parking lot horror
Print Edition
AUTHORITIES called to a Wal-Mart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, yesterday found eight people dead and 20 others in dire condition in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer, in what police are calling a horrific case of immigrant smuggling.
The truck’s driver was arrested and all 28 survivors taken to hospital, where 20 are in an extremely critical or serious condition, authorities said. Eight others were being treated for lesser injuries, including heat stroke and dehydration. Their nationalities aren’t yet known. San Antonio is about 240 kilometers from the border with Mexico.
Temperatures there reached 38 degrees Celsius on Saturday and didn’t dip to 32 until after 10pm, according to the National Weather Service. The truck’s trailer didn’t have a working air conditioner, San Antonio fire chief Charles Hood told reporters.
“They were very hot to the touch. So these people were in this trailer without any signs of any type of water,” he said. “It was a mass casualty situation for us.”
A person from the truck initially approached a Wal-Mart employee in the parking lot and asked for water late on Saturday night or early yesterday, police chief William McManus said. The employee gave the person the water and then called police, who found the dead and desperate inside the truck.
McManus said the driver was arrested, but he didn’t release the driver’s name.
Investigators checked store surveillance video, which showed vehicles had arrived and picked up other people from the tractor-trailer, police said.
“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 that there were also what appeared to be two school-age children. He called the case “a horrific tragedy.”
Investigators could be seen gathering evidence from the truck yesterday hours after those who were inside — living and dead — were taken away. The trailer had an Iowa license plate but no other markings. The truck was parked on the side of the Wal-Mart and the investigation didn’t appear to be interfering with commerce, as customers could be seen coming and going.
The US Department of Homeland Security is assisting in the investigation.
Other cases of human trafficking in the United States have led to more deaths. In May 2003, 19 immigrants who were being transported from South Texas to Houston inside a sweltering tractor-trailer died.
Prosecutors said the driver in that case heard the immigrants screaming for their lives as they succumbed to the stifling heat inside his truck but he refused to free them. In 2011, the driver was sentenced to nearly 34 years in prison after an appeal court overturned the life sentences he received.
In Mexico, smugglers have often crammed migrants bound for the US into tractor-trailers. Authorities there 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. Most of the migrants were from Central America, 48 of them minors.
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