17 found dead in Texas

VICTORIA, Texas -- Sheriff's deputies found the bodies of 17 suspected illegal immigrants early Wednesday in and around a truck trailer that was packed with dozens of people and left at a South Texas truck stop. Another person who had been locked inside died at a hospital.\nA suspect, believed to have been the driver of the tractor-trailer rig, was arrested hours later, Victoria County District Attorney Dexter Eaves said.\nAuthorities wouldn't immediately say if the people inside the trailer were illegal immigrants, though officials from the Mexican Consulate were at the truck stop to help identify the victims.\n"This case involves the greatest loss of life in recent history in what appears to be an alien smuggling case," said Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security. Hutchinson said the federal agency was working with local authorities to help apprehend those involved. "This grim discovery is a horrific reminder of the callous disregard smugglers have for their human cargo," he said in Washington.\nDeputies found the bodies shortly after 2 a.m. when they answered a reported disturbance inside a refrigerated trailer at a truck stop near Victoria, said sheriff's investigator Stuart Posey.\nAs many as 40 other people may have fled the trailer into nearby fields and woods after the back door was opened, Sheriff Michael Ratcliff said. "Nineteen of those individuals have been located. They are now at our local community center, receiving medical attention, water and food," he said. He wouldn't say if the refrigeration unit had been operating.\nJerrel Robinowich, a spokesman for Detar Hospital Navarro, said about 60 people were in the back of the truck with little or no ventilation. "And you can just imagine the consequences of that." At least six men were taken to Detar Hospital, including one who was in critical condition. Eight others were taken to Citizens Medical Center, where one died. The men taken to Detar ranged in age from 20 to 47 and all suffered from heat-related injuries, Robinowich said. "It's brutally hot down here," he said. The National Weather Service said it was 74 degrees with 93 percent humidity at 2 a.m. The high Tuesday was 91, one degree shy of a record for the date.\nRatcliff wouldn't say how long the people may have been in the back of the trailer, where they came from and where they might have been heading. Asked if any children were among them, Ratcliff said, "We have not identified anyone, and we're not going to speculate on ages." He said the trailer had arrived at the truck stop on Highway 77, about 230 miles north of the Mexican border, about an hour before authorities were notified. The driver had unhitched the cab and left the trailer behind.\nBorder Patrol agents were searching the area on foot and with a helicopter.\nMarco Nunez, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Houston, said consulate officials were in Victoria and working with the sheriff's office and immigration officials to identify the victims. "What happened is tragic but we have yet to confirm any of the details of the case," Nunez said.\nBodies were still in the back of the trailer late Wednesday morning as investigators gathered evidence from the scene.\nThere have been several cases of illegal immigrants dying in sealed containers as they are being brought secretly into the country. In October, workers at a grain elevator in Denison, Iowa, discovered the badly decomposed bodies of 11 migrants in a grain car that was being prepared for loading. Authorities estimated the four women and seven men had been trapped inside the grain car for at least four months and died of dehydration and hypothermia, or overheating. Last July, authorities found two dead immigrants and at least 28 others crammed into the back of a sweltering, unventilated tractor-trailer truck during a 600-mile trip from El Paso to Dallas. 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 put them aboard a boxcar in El Paso and locked the door. Temperatures in the boxcar reached 130 degrees.