From: SIUHIN@aol.com
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 15:45:36 EDT
Bodies Found in Train After 4 Months
By AMY LORENTZEN
.c The Associated Press
DENISON, Iowa (AP) - The bodies of as many as 11 people were found inside a
railroad car stored at a grain elevator.
The car had been latched on the outside and there was no evidence of any food
or water, Crawford County Sheriff Tom Hogan said Tuesday.
The victims had apparently boarded the rail car in Mexico four months ago and
were possibly smuggled into the country, said Jerry Heinauer, district
director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for Nebraska and Iowa.
It was difficult to count the huddled bodies, Hogan said. Authorities had
said there were as many as 11.
The grain-hauling rail car was sealed and moved to Des Moines for examination
by criminal investigators and the state medical examiner.
Heinauer said authorities did not yet know if the victims were being
smuggled, but he said the case fits the pattern of some smuggling operations.
Their nationality was unconfirmed and authorities said they didn't know if
the victims were men, women or children.
``Unfortunately, it does happen occasionally that smugglers lead migrants
into the United States and then they lock them in cars so that authorities
wouldn't check the cars,'' Heinauer said.
``And, sometimes what happens, closer on the U.S. side, the migrants will
make some sort of commotion. They're literally trapped inside and sometimes
authorities will be able to save them. In this case it seems they were not
and that their deaths were horrific.''
Hogan said authorities would seek to determine if the people died of
suffocation, from the heat or starvation.
``It had to be frightening'' for the people inside, he said.
Heinauer said he was told by Mexican officials that the rail car left
Matamoros, Mexico, in June. It had been parked in Oklahoma since then, before
being brought to Denison, about 60 miles northeast of Omaha, Neb.
Matamoros, near McAllen, Texas, was once one of the major centers for illegal
immigrants seeking to enter the United States. The increased border
enforcement in the 1990s shifted many immigrants away from Matamoros and
farther west.
The bodies were found Monday afternoon by workers flipping open the lids of
rail cars so they could be cleaned before loading at a grain elevator west of
town, Crawford County Sheriff Tom Hogan said.
Jose Luis Cuevas, Mexican consul for the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska, said
officials of Union Pacific Railroad, which brought the cars to Denison, gave
him the impression that the bodies had been in the car at least four months.
``I presume as soon as they have some type of a way to match the ID or to try
to determine possible ID, then we'll follow up with Mexico to see if we can
put a name to the person,'' Cuevas said.
``The loss of life is a real tragedy,'' Cuevas said.
In 1987, Border Patrol agents found 18 Mexican immigrants dead and one barely
alive in a boxcar left on a rail siding in Sierra Blanca, Texas. The survivor
told authorities the man who smuggled them across the border had put them
aboard a boxcar in El Paso and locked the door.
Temperatures in the boxcar reached 130 degrees and 18 men suffocated. The man
who survived had punched a breathing hole in the floor with a railway spike.
On the Net:
Union Pacific: http://www.unionpacific.com
10/15/02 13:14 EDT
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