The Border Fence, Brownsville 
“We Are Going to Die In Here”
Sometime after ten o’ clock on the night of May 13, 2003, at least 74 illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Dominican Republic crowded into the airtight container of an eighteen-wheeler in Harlingen, bound for Houston and a better life. Along the way, seventeen of them succumbed to dehydration, hyperthermia, and suffocation; two more would perish a short time later. In this excerpt from the just-released Dying to Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History, Jorge Ramos describes what it was like inside the sweltering trailer on that horrible night.
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“I saw death,” Israel declares, as tears threaten to spill from his eyes. “I saw it, very clearly. In the darkness, I saw a shadow pass by me. And I said, ‘The devil has taken over this truck.’ So many people cursing. So many people shouting all kinds of things to the devil, to Satan. I felt awful, really awful.” Israel tried to get up and move toward the back, but he was suddenly struck by the feeling that he too would die if he moved from where he was sitting. At some point, his energy depleted, he lost consciousness.
A few steps away from Israel, Alberto’s strength was dwindling. “I started to fall asleep now and then,” he says. “That was when I really got scared.” He prayed, “Lord, I think we are going to die. Forgive me if I have failed here.”
A group of women were busy praying as well. “As things began to get desperate, they all began to pray,” Alberto says. “I had never heard those songs before. They sang. They prayed. Instead of wasting their energy, they just prayed.”
Some of the passengers had begun to feel cramps in their extremities and a strange, uncomfortable sensation around their mouths. So much sweating had depleted their bodies of salt, and this, in part, was what had brought on the cramping. Because of the excessive heat, a rash of little blisters had broken out on their necks and hands. When they scratched at the rash, their fingernails turned black from the combination of sweat and damp skin cells. Their breathing rate continued to accelerate as their bodies reacted to the lack of oxygen. They couldn’t tell it in the darkness, but their skin had turned a pale grayish-blue.
The passengers’ feelings of despair only exacerbated their physical condition: When breathing quickens, the heart must work much harder than normal, at a level that is impossible to sustain for very long. If someone didn’t get them out of there soon, they were all going to die.
The intense collective body heat began to claim more victims. Several passengers’ bodies lost their ability to regulate their temperature, and this gave way to tremors, convulsions, swelling of the lungs, and, finally, death brought on by arrhythmia or heart failure.
There was no real way to tell who had died and who had just passed out. Because the bodies of the dead continued to give off a great deal of heat—106 degrees, maybe more—many of their fellow passengers did not realize that some around them had died. As they neared death, some of the immigrants twitched with muscle spasms, belched, and passed gas, and on occasion these functions continued for a few moments after death.
The difference between the living and the dead was a breath, a prayer, a monumental effort to keep the eyes open. Nobody was crying anymore; their bodies didn’t have enough liquid to form tears. Panic and anxiety attacks further worsened things for some of the immigrants, who might have survived had they been able to hang on to a bit more energy.
As all this was happening, the people who had managed to conserve their strength remained glued to the walls of the container. “¡Párate ya!” they screamed at the driver. “Stop now! Stop now!”
The survivors interviewed for this book say their banging efforts were loud and strenuous, and they find it difficult to believe that the truck driver did not hear them as they banged away and prayed and cried out to God—or, in their desperation, to the devil. Some passengers even tried to overturn the trailer by getting everyone who could to lean against one side of it at the same time. But the trailer didn’t budge, and the truck just continued on its way.
Walking around inside the trailer was not easy either. Several passengers say that the truck would sometimes stop short and then accelerate. These sudden movements may have been produced by the conditions on the road, but they also may have been the driver’s attempt to get them to stop leaning against the trailer walls.
The Final Hour
THERE IS NO WAY to know exactly how high the temperature rose inside the trailer, but the Associated Press, citing local authorities, suggested that it may have hit 173 degrees. After about three hours on the road, the passengers finally began to feel the air conditioning system kick in. Some of the survivors say they felt “a bit of air” waft across their bodies. But the remedy had arrived too late. A person suffering from a body temperature of more than 100 degrees would not have been able to recover with air conditioning alone. A high body temperature will not go down on its own for several hours. And time was running out.
Whistles seemed to echo through the air during this fourth hour of the journey. Who could possibly be whistling under these circumstances? Yet these were not normal, everyday whistles. They were the sharp, almost chirping sounds made by the passengers’ narrow, swollen windpipes as they breathed the air inside the truck.
A mixture of saliva and blood trickled from the mouths of some of the dead. Other passengers said they experienced intense stomach pains, which were followed by expulsions of saliva loaded with blood clots. Those who had survived were now facing the possibility of brain damage or acute kidney failure.
Then, after four hours on the road, the truck suddenly came to a stop. As he’d approached Victoria on U.S. 77, Tyrone Williams had apparently become aware that one of his taillights was dangling. Up ahead he saw a gas station and pulled over. It was the Speedy Stop Truck Stop.
As soon as he stepped down from the cab to examine the taillight, he heard people shouting and banging inside the truck.
Enrique could now see the driver through the hole he had made. “Who is it?” Alberto asked him. “A Mexican?”
“No,” Enrique answered. “A black man.”
“Open the door,” Alberto cried. “Open the door!”
Enrique tried speaking to the driver in rudimentary but straightforward English. He remembers looking at him and getting the feeling that he was going to unhook the truck container from the cab. Inside the trailer, the passengers continued to bang against the walls. Enrique heard the driver say that he was going to leave them there, and he’d given no indication that he was going to open the doors.
Enrique was distraught. “Excuse me, man,” he cried out in English. “No more water. The baby is die!”
“One guy died?” Tyrone asked.
“Yes, man. Guy die,” Enrique insisted, again in English. He told the driver that if he didn’t open the doors soon, they would all die and he would be in trouble with the law. “Open door, please. You no open the door maybe is die everybody in ten minutes, five minutes. You gotta problem with the police.”
“What?” Tyrone replied. “Guys are dying?”
At 1:55 a.m., Tyrone entered the gas station’s convenience store; a security camera caught him on tape as he approached the cash register to pay for twenty bottles of water.
He passed the bottles to the immigrants through the two holes in the truck. Some bottles exploded in the chaos, grabbed too tightly by too many anxious hands. Those who managed to get a bottle downed its contents in practically a single gulp.
Then Tyrone sent Fatima Holloway, an acquaintance of his who had accompanied him on the trip, to buy more water. She was captured by the convenience store’s surveillance cameras as she made a purchase. It was 2:03 in the morning.
Her movements indicated no sense of urgency as she walked back and forth between the counter and the shelves stocked with bottles of water. She emerged from the store with two white plastic bags and, as she would later testify, gave the water to Tyrone, who sent her back to buy more.
Then, four hours after leaving Harlingen, Tyrone pulled a lever and opened the container’s two doors.
He found himself staring at several people in the fetal position; that was when he first realized something was very, very wrong. He recalled hearing a woman cry out, “El niño, el niño,” over and over again. Tyrone does not speak Spanish, but he quickly made the connection between the woman’s cries and what Enrique had told him.
Enrique secured a bottle of water for Alberto and passed it to him. “I drank a little and then hid it under my clothes, like it was my one and only treasure,” Alberto recalls. “There was a girl near me. I touched her neck; she was still breathing. I grabbed the bottle I had hidden and poured some water on her lips. Back then I had long hair, and she grabbed it, totally desperate, and refused to let go.
“I felt weak and said to myself, ‘I think I’m going to stay here a little bit.’ But then I got scared that they were going to close the doors again. I heard the truck make noises, as if it was about to take off. I got down right away, but the girl stayed where she was.”
Then, according to his own statements to investigators, a frightened Tyrone Williams disengaged the driver’s cab from the truck bed and fled the scene with Fatima Holloway. The trailer was left abandoned on the side of the road, as were the people inside.
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