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 Editorials | Issues | October 2006 
Mexican Describes Deadly Smuggling Trip
 Juan A. Lozano - Associated Press
The tractor-trailer was to be the last stage on Jose Juan Roldan Castro's long journey to Houston. He had already been smuggled safely over the border from Mexico, and he didn't think these last four hours would put his life in danger.
At a secluded Harlingen field, the Mexican national climbed into the back of the trailer with more than 70 other illegal immigrants.
There was an air conditioning system, but the driver never turned it on. Inside, the trailer quickly began to feel like an oven, Roldan said. The immigrants peeled off their clothes. They punched holes through the back doors for air as their body temperatures rose as high as 113 degrees.
Four hours later, after the driver abandoned the trailer at a truck stop 100 miles southwest of Houston, 17 people were dead of dehydration, overheating and suffocation inside, and two more wouldn't survive.
"They told me (the trip) would be by trailer but in the cabin of the trailer," Roldan, 30, testified Wednesday at the retrial of the driver, Tyrone Williams.
Prosecutors say Williams, indicted on 58 counts of transporting, harboring and conspiracy, was solely responsible for the immigrants' deaths because he failed to turn on the air conditioning unit and ignored the cries for help.
His defense attorney, Craig Washington, argues Williams never intended to harm the immigrants and that other members of the smuggling ring were responsible because they overfilled the trailer. He has said Williams didn't speak Spanish and couldn't understand the immigrants' pleas.
Williams, 35, a Jamaican citizen who lived in Schenectady, N.Y., was the only one of 14 people charged in the case to face the death penalty. Seven others were sentenced to prison; sentencing for three is pending; charges against two were dismissed and one remains a fugitive.
A jury convicted Williams last year on 38 transporting counts related to what became the nation's deadliest human smuggling attempt, but he avoided a death sentence because the jurors couldn't agree on his role in the crime; the jury deadlocked on the other counts. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the verdict thrown out because the jury failed to specify his role in the crime.
Roldan, from Puebla, Mexico, was the first survivor to testify in the retrial.
He detailed for the jury how he paid $1,850 to be smuggled across the border into Brownsville and then hidden in homes, including one that was filled with more than 50 other immigrants, before he was put in the trailer.
Authorities who were called to the scene after the abandoned trailer was found in May 2003 described seeing piles of half-naked bodies inside and bloody claw marks on the doors. One of the dead was a boy just 5 years old. |
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