Immigrants on deadly journey huddled around single air vent

Undocumented immigrants were found dead in a semi parked at a Southwest San Antonio Walmart on Sunday, July 23, 2017. Billy Calzada / Express-News
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The tractor-trailer would have air conditioning, a necessity in the triple-digit summer heat, the smugglers assured the dozens of immigrants who piled into the parked trailer in the border city of Laredo.

But when the doors closed Saturday night, the container was already very hot and the people, who had crossed into the U.S. illegally, were thirsty and sweating, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday. They weren’t provided food or water. The driver later told police that the truck’s refrigeration system was broken and that the trailer’s four vents were likely clogged.

For the first hour of the 150-mile drive to San Antonio, everything was fine, several immigrants later told investigators. Then people started to lose consciousness. One person said that 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 Southwest Side after one man had stumbled out and a store employee had called 911 — eight people were dead. Two more have since died.

The details of the harsh conditions endured by the dozens of undocumented 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, Kentucky, 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 bail until a 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 the Walmart employee called police. Of the 39 in and near the truck when police arrived, 31 were taken to area hospitals for treatment.

Bradley told investigators that he didn’t know there were people in the trailer and that 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, alerted by the Walmart employee, whom one of the immigrants asked for water, according to the complaint. The driver told investigators he called his wife, who didn’t answer, but didn’t call 911 after finding the immigrants, 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, 150 miles north.

The immigrants described the stop in the San Antonio Walmart not as a chance bathroom break but the next step in a highly coordinated smuggling effort.

After different groups of immigrants — one smuggler was taking 28, another 24 — converged on the trailer in Laredo on Saturday morning, they were ushered inside and the doors were closed. They wouldn’t leave until after 9 p.m.

“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’d already 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 Rio Grande. He was told he’d have to pay an additional $5,500 when he reached San Antonio, where he planned to stay.

One of the immigrants 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.

Another immigrant, who was going to Minnesota with his brother, estimated that there were 180 to 200 people in the truck, which is considerably higher than previous estimates.

The immigrant from Aguascalientes told investigators that when they reached San Antonio, six black SUVs were waiting and left within minutes full of immigrants. Earlier, before leaving Laredo, the smugglers had handed out differently colored strips of tape to each group so they knew whom to leave with upon arrival in San Antonio.

Such a sophisticated smuggling system is “not unusual at all,” said Julian Calderas, 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 the 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 Lara Vega, 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,” Lara Vega told the AP on Monday from his bed in a San Antonio hospital. “That’s when I lost consciousness.”

He woke up the next day in the hospital, the AP reported.

Late Monday, a pair of men who had been among those transported by Bradley quietly appeared for a hearing in federal court in San Antonio.

The men, both from unspecified parts of Mexico, were held as 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.

Twitter: @jlbuch

Staff Writers Kelsey Bradshaw and Guillermo Contreras contributed to this report.