8 People Found Dead In Truck In San Antonio

A horrific incident of human trafficking was discovered in the parking lot of a Walmart in San Antonio, TX.  Eight people were discovered dead inside a tractor-trailer and around three dozen people more were in very bad shape, many of them unconscious and unable to speak.  Thirty people were taken to the hospital, 17 were listed in critical condition with one critical patient dying later.  Another 13 people were in serious condition.  In total, 39 people were in the back of the trailer, two were school age children but most were in their twenties and thirties.

Authorities were alerted when the employees of the San Antonio Walmart saw the tractor-trailer in their parking lot for a long time. When some employees went to check on the trailer, the driver asked for water. While giving him the water, police were alerted who reached the scene within a short time.

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said that when police arrived on the scene, they discovered eight people dead and 30 suffering from various injuries.  The driver, identified as James M. Bradley Jr., 60, of Clearwater, Florida was arrested at the scene.

The eight people whose bodies were initially found were believed to have died from heat exposure and asphyxiation.  San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood told the media “We quickly called a ‘mass casualty incident’ and had about 29 units arrive out there and start transporting people”.  “With heat strokes or heat injuries, a lot of them are going to have some irreversible brain damage”.

He added, “Unfortunately, some of them were severely overheated, and that was a refrigerated truck with no refrigeration…So the inside of the truck was just austere condition that nobody was going to survive in it. So we were very fortunate that they were found because if they would have spent another night in that environment, we would have 38 people who would not have survived.”

San Antonio police are investigating what they believe is a massive human trafficking operation.  Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were helping with the investigation. Surveillance video showed that several vehicles had approached the trailer to pick up people. Some occupants fled into the woods nearby.  Authorities are searching the entire area on foot and by air using helicopters to locate those that ran into the woods.

Smugglers often transport large groups of migrants from stash houses near the border in tractor-trailers, or disperse them in smaller vehicles, taking them to cities like Houston or San Antonio.  A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, said that the people in the truck were probably migrants who had crossed the Mexican border on foot and been taken to a stash house before being put in the tractor-trailer to be transported farther north.

Just this month in Houston, about a dozen immigrants being smuggled in a cargo truck were rescued after being left in the locked vehicle for about 12 hours in a strip-mall parking lot. A police officer heard the immigrants, including a 16-year-old girl, banging on the walls for help.