Up Against the Wall. Peter Laufer

Chapter 5

       DEATH ALONG FOR THE RIDE

      Texas summers bake. I know; when we lived in a stuffy Dallas bungalow, my wife and I periodically treated ourselves to relief from the heat and humidity with the company car. We’d just sit in the driveway, air conditioner cranked up high, listen to the radio and cool off. WFAA Radio bought the gasoline and somehow we rationalized the exhaust.

      On a hot May 13, 2003, well before summer, down by the Mexico border near Harlingen, smugglers guided as many as a hundred immigrants into a freight trailer. They had just crossed the border illegally, wading across the Rio Grande as so many millions of Mexicans and others had done before that hot night. The doors to the long van swung shut, and the truck headed north through the night toward its destination, Houston.

      Not three hours later, just outside Victoria at a Harris County gas station, the driver stopped his rig, opened the back doors of the trailer and abandoned it and its devastated cargo.¹ Nineteen of his hundred or so passengers were dead or dying, killed by heat stroke and dehydration, greed and incompetence, desperation for a better life and unenforceable U.S. immigration laws. One of the dead was a 5-year-old Mexican boy.

      “No Sheriff likes to be called at two o’clock in the morning to be told he has multiple deceased people in his community,” Sheriff Mike Ratcliff says when he recalls that miserable night.

      “Upon arrival at the location we discovered there were multiple victims on the ground. Then, of course, we had to deal with the victims who had dissipated into the woodlands surrounding the area—snake-infested terrain—that we had to worry about.” Sheriff Ratcliff tends to speak in official-sounding jargon, with words such as “dissipated” and “co-victims.” But after just a few minutes discussing with him then the worst case of human smuggling in U.S. history, his compassion is obvious.

      “We had some witnesses, co-victims, if you will, who described the number of people in the vehicle. We could estimate that as many as 60 to 90 people were on the ground in our community. We had to deal with that problem as well.”

      While Customs and Border Protection, with a special ICE investigative team, raced to Victoria to take over the federalized investigation, Ratcliff’s detectives hunted down the truck driver, Tyrone Powers, finding him a few hours after he ran from the tragedy.

      The sheriff is still shaken six months later when he retells the story of that dreadful night. His deputies called him to come quickly, which was no problem. His home is just a mile and a half from the crime scene. He feels no mercy for the ring of smugglers and their driver.

      “It’s difficult for me as a 26-year veteran of law enforcement to consider that a person doesn’t know the cargo in his van,” he says about Powers’ initial defense tactic. “Human cargo is unacceptable. The thought of human beings trapped, encapsulated in that trailer and brought to our country, or taken anywhere in 100 degree weather is totally …” his voice trails off for a few seconds. “Well, it’s just unacceptable.”

      What’s the correct penalty for such a crime?

      “Should a person be put to death for the death of nineteen people?” He considers the question. “I would tell you in my estimation, if they did it one time, they could do it again because greed seemed to premise everything. If greed allowed them to do it that one time to nineteen people, and that little boy, then the opportunity for them to do it again would not be changed by anything but death.”

      Driver Powers did finally open the trailer door. Was that an act of humanity? No, says the Sheriff, it was a result of stupidity.

      His stupidity ran out when his human resources came into play and he decided to buy water for some of the victims and he opened the doors to the trailer. That was when stupidity was overcome by human nature. But the one factor to be considered is that if he did this one time, there is the potential that he could do this again. And the world can’t stand that loss of life. Our community will not overcome that tragedy. We are now the site of the most tragic immigrant loss of lives in our nation’s history.

      Oil and cattle were the magic that made Victoria famous during its booming past. Back in the 1930s ranchers around Victoria began discovering oil and natural gas under their rangeland. By the 1950s Victoria boasted more millionaires per capita than any other American city. Today memories of those times are enhanced by the stately Victorian homes still scattered throughout the city. The Sheriff’s office is in the heart of the old downtown, a modern concrete and glass building just off the old city square. Sheriff Ratcliff clearly wishes a truckload of dead immigrants had not replaced oil and cattle as his city’s reason for notoriety.

      “As sheriff of the county, I will do whatever I can to ensure that our community and our state and our nation never have to undergo that type of tragedy again. We are a caring people. We love fellow human beings. If they come to the country illegally, we will deal with them under the appropriate law.”

      But Ratcliff is convinced the laws need to be changed. “We need to come up with laws that would help these people. We need to create the legal method for people to enter our country to work or go to school or do other things that they feel they need to do to help their families and themselves.”²

      Buried Alive

      Inside that trailer coffin, suffocating with his brother, was Guillermo Cabrera from Veracruz, Mexico. He was on his way to the rolling hills of south-central Kentucky, promised work on a dairy farm.

      “The heat started about eleven, really by nine,” he says about the ride north. “By eleven, twelve you can really feel it. Hot. Some people were already fainted, six or seven. Some friends in there started to faint. And like that: very strong heat, like in Hell, an inferno.”

      Cabrera and I are sitting at a plastic table in what he calls la tiendita, the little store, Paul’s Minute Market at the Key Stop gas station in Temple Hill, Kentucky. Cabrera survived the inferno; his brother died.

      We were both there, but I never saw my brother during the whole crisis. I never saw him again. I couldn’t find him. Where was he? When they opened the door, there were a lot of people lying on the floor of the trailer because it was really hot inside, very hot. But I do not know how I got out of there. Many of us have no idea how we got out of there. We realized that we were alive because God is great.

      Guillermo Cabrera’s eyes tear. He looks away, but keeps telling his story.

      “Later, seven days later, I learned that my brother had died. I was in the hospital. I was there for four days, almost dying. I was really sick. I didn’t know what was going on. Everything was erased.”

      Cabrera is wearing a baseball cap announcing, “Branson, Mo. The Ozarks.” His T-shirt is more specific. It’s a rendition of the Liberty Bell featuring the words, “America” and “Let Freedom Ring.” He drove up to the Minute Market in an old faded red Ford Ranger pickup. We met at seven in the morning. Three old-timers were nursing their coffee behind a sign in the window announcing, “We sell and recommend Coon Hunter’s Pride.”

      “Is it okay to talk here?” I asked him, quietly in Spanish, not knowing his immigration status.

      He assured me it would be no problems and he casually greeted the regulars. Cabrera is one of the lucky ones. Not only did he survive the inferno but the U.S. government also rewarded his trauma by granting him the legal right to stay north of the border.

      Whose fault was the disaster, I ask him.

      “Well, you pay for them to bring you here safe and alive,” he says about the smugglers. “But they don’t know how you are going to arrive. If they are going to put you into a trailer, they should give you fresh air. Since everything is closed, you don’t know what is going to happen in there.”

      He soon knew something was very wrong.

      With all the heat, your head is not working well. Many things start going on in your head.