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 Editorials | Issues | October 2007 
Border Deaths Rise 29% in Past Year
 David L. Teibel - Tucson Citizen
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| | Toll rivals combined total for local car crashes, homicides; remains found may include some that were missed earlier. |
They come by the hundreds of thousands, mostly honest people seeking better jobs than they can get in their homeland.
And they die by the hundreds in Arizona's unforgiving desert.
Combine all the homicides and all the motor vehicle fatalities in Pima County each year and you'll have roughly the number of illegal immigrants who die trying to cross the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector in the same period.
While arrests of illegal immigrants have fallen, the number of people dying in the desert and along its roads is rising dramatically.
The official toll will be tallied next week for the federal fiscal year that ends Sunday.
Unofficially, county medical examiners put the count through Aug. 31 at 216, a 29 percent increase over the same period a year before. That may be because manpower on the border increased and more skeletal remains were found that were missed in previous years.
Even Border Patrol numbers, usually lower than the number of deaths counted by medical examiners, show that from Oct. 1, 2006, to Aug. 31 there were 14.2 percent more illegal immigrant deaths in the Tucson sector than in the entire previous fiscal year.
The Tucson sector is the most active of the Border Patrol's nine sectors, said Border Patrol Agent Michael Scioli.
The Border Patrol lists only those dead immigrants who carried identification showing they were from a foreign country, or those for whom a relative or friend can be found, said Border Patrol Agent Dove Haber.
Pima County Medical Examiner Bruce O. Parks, on the other hand, counts bodies found in the desert, often near known people-smuggling routes, where "there is no valid reason for people to be."
The Tucson sector covers all of Arizona except for Yuma, La Paz and Mohave counties.
But "the great majority" of Tucson sector deaths occur in southern Arizona, Parks said.
He also does autopsies under contract for Pinal and Santa Cruz counties. Cochise County has its own medical examiner, who provided death figures for his county.
Parks said some bodies found in the past year may be the remains of people who were missed in earlier years.
"We had quite a few skeletal remains," Parks said.
Also, he said, "there are more people out there who are searching, canvassing the area . . . a greater number of Border Patrol agents."
Add to that some 2,500 to 3,000 National Guard troops from around the country who have cycled through the Tucson sector as part of Operation Jump Start, a presidential plan to beef up border security, said Tucson sector spokesman Rob Daniels.
The troopers free Border Patrol agents for patrol duties by doing such things as vehicle maintenance, road building and staffing observation posts, Daniels said.
Also, the Border Patrol has been ordered to hire more agents under the 2005 Secure Border Initiative and currently some 3,000 agents are assigned here, Scioli said.
Death figures provided by the Cochise County Medical Examiner's Office show most illegal immigrants in that county died of exposure.
Brutal summer heat
Vehicle rollovers or drowning kill some illegal immigrants, but the majority of deaths are generally attributed to heat.
The average summer high this year was 99 degrees, said meteorologist Tom Evans, with the National Weather Service here.
Last summer it was 95.5 degrees and in the summer of 2005 it was 99.3. In the summer of 2004 the average high was 97.7 and in 2003 it was 99.7.
Even in 1964, which had the coolest summer on record, the average high temperature here was 93.9 degrees. The average was 103.6 degrees in 1994, the hottest summer on record, Evans said.
The deaths are gruesome.
After the Aug. 28 death of a man found shirtless under a piece of plywood in the desert, Border Patrol Agent Sean King said it is common to find victims of the heat hiding under anything that will offer even a small amount of protection from the sun.
As the heat works on illegal immigrants' bodies, they will often strip off their clothing, which makes them even more vulnerable to the sun, King said.
Agents have found bodies by following trails of discarded clothing, he said.
Long before the clothing goes, however, illegal immigrants drop extra clothing, extra shoes, backpacks and food, Scioli said.
Fatal miscalculation
The first thing distressed illegal immigrants pitch is often their water, typically carried in 1-gallon jugs, Scioli said.
The water is heavy, 8 pounds per gallon, and bulky, Scioli said.
And, "they don't think that they need that. They think water is out there in cattle tanks and a lot of times the smugglers will tell them, 'Don't worry there is water out there,' when there is none," Scioli said.
The smugglers lie to them to get them to lighten their load so they can move faster. A slow-moving group is easier to catch, Scioli said.
As illegal immigrants succumb to the heat they may become disoriented and walk in circles, and some have hallucinated water where there is desert and have been found dead with sand in their mouths, packed in as they died thinking it was life-giving water, agents have said.
Victims become incoherent. "They're not in their right minds," Parks said.
Said Daniels: "The smugglers want money. They will abandon those who can't keep up. They will leave them to die on their own."
Girls try to save mom
Any of the death stories are tragic, Daniels said.
But among the saddest cases, he said, is the death Sept. 16 of Maria Hernandez Escobedo, 39, of Durango, Mexico.
Escobedo crossed the border illegally Sept. 14 with her 9- and 12-year-old daughters Nancy Valdez Hernandez and Sandra Valdez Hernandez, said Carol Capas, a Cochise County sheriff's spokeswoman.
The girls later told deputies and Border Patrol agents that by the morning of the 16th, they had run out of water and their mother began hallucinating and going in and out of consciousness.
The girls set out to find help that afternoon and ran across Border Patrol agents.
The children told the agents what had happened and led them to their mother, who was found under a tree along state Route 80 about two miles east of Bisbee, Capas said.
She said the agents found the woman unresponsive and called medics from the Bisbee Fire Department. When they arrived they found Escobedo had died.
The children were turned over to Mexican authorities who worked to return them to family members in Mexico, Capas said.
The investigation, Capas said, was turned over to the Cochise County Sheriff's Department and Escobedo's body was turned over to the Cochise County Office of the Medical Examiner for an autopsy.
Bodies held up to 6 months
Eventually, the bodies of nearly all the illegal immigrants found dead in the desert make it to a county medical examiner for autopsy, Parks said.
In his case, Parks said, that costs county taxpayers between $100,000 and $200,000 a year.
The bodies are held from a day or two to as long as six months, depending on how long it takes to identify the person and whether family members can be found who will arrange for burial.
In some cases identities never are determined, no family is found and responsibility for the bodies is turned over to the county's public fiduciary for an indigent burial in a public plot, Parks said.
The only time an illegal immigrant's body is not turned over to a medical examiner's office is if the person makes it to a hospital where he or she dies of natural causes, such as a disease, and a doctor is willing to sign a death certificate listing a cause of death, which rarely happens, Parks said.
Source: U.S. Border PatrolSource: U.S. Border Patrol Sources: Pima County and Cochise County medical examiners' offices |
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