Six migrants were found dead in a Texas train car. An arrest could crack the case
Police are digging into how six migrants, including a teenager, died inside a freight car that arrived at a rail yard in Laredo, Texas, last week.
The discovery of a potential seventh body and a recent arrest connected to a federal smuggling investigation in the region could hold the keys to explaining the tragedy.
On May 10, a Union Pacific employee inspecting a train car at a company facility in Laredo discovered six bodies.
Preliminary investigations indicate that the group was compromised of a woman and two men from Mexico, as well as three men from Honduras, all of whom died of overheating inside the train car. Their ages ranged from 14 to 56.
“We are demanding justice for these lives lost,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño said at a news conference Thursday. “It doesn’t matter where they came from.”
A day after the initial six bodies were found, a seventh set of remains was discovered near railroad tracks in Bexar County, nearly 150 miles away, where investigators discovered a man’s body with a Mexican ID.
Authorities believe the body may be linked to the Laredo deaths, though no official connection has been announced between the cases.
“On these trains, there is a censor on some of the containers that alerts whenever a container’s opened,” Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar told reporters on Monday. “Once those bodies were found in Laredo, they came back to this location here and started patrolling up and down the railroad tracks until such time that they found him.”
A family member identified the man to Fox San Antonio as 49-year-old Nereo Aguilar Garcia.
The train had previously been in Del Rio, Texas, to the west of San Antonio. It then split up its cars closer to the city, with some heading south towards Laredo, the sheriff said.
The same day the seventh body was found, federal officials with Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant near the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio as part of a human smuggling case.
During the search, three people ran from the house, waded into the Rio Grande River, and fled into Mexico, according to court documents seen by The Independent.
At the house, officers arrested Mayra Huerta on suspicion of harboring undocumented immigrants.
Huerta told HSI agents she lived at the house with her husband and her husband’s son and nephew, all of whom are Mexican nationals without legal authority to be in the U.S. The Independent has contacted Huerta’s attorney for comment.
