11 decomposing bodies found in railroad car

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Eleven decomposing bodies found in a railroad car in Iowa several months after leaving Mexico

By Amy Lorentzen, Associated Press, 10/15/2002 05:02

DENISON, Iowa (AP) Workers at a grain elevator were cracking open rail cars left in storage when they came across a grisly discovery: Eleven decomposing bodies.

All the victims had apparently boarded the rail car in Mexico four months ago and were possibly smuggled into the country, said Jerry Heinauer, district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for Nebraska and Iowa.

After Monday's discovery, the rail car was sealed and shipped to Des Moines for examination by criminal investigators and the state medical examiner. The tests were to be conducted Tuesday.

Heinauer said authorities do not yet know whether the occupants of the rail car were being smuggled, but he said it fits the pattern of some smuggling operations. Their nationality was unconfirmed.

''Unfortunately it does happen occasionally that smugglers lead migrants into the United States and then they lock them in cars so that authorities wouldn't check the cars,'' Heinauer said.

''And, sometimes what happens, closer on the U.S. side, the migrants will make some sort of commotion. They're literally trapped inside and sometimes authorities will be able to save them. In this case it seems they were not and that their deaths were horrific.''

Heinauer said he was told by the Mexican consul that the rail car left Matamoros, Mexico, in June. It had been parked in Oklahoma since then, before heading to Denison, about 60 miles northeast of Omaha, Neb.

Matamoros, near McAllen, Texas, was once one of the major centers for illegal immigrants seeking to enter the United States. The increased border enforcement in the 1990s shifted many immigrants away from Matamoros and farther west.

The bodies were found Monday afternoon by workers flipping open the lids of rail cars so they could be cleaned before loading at a grain elevator west of town, Crawford County Sheriff Tom Hogan said.

Authorities said they didn't know if the victims were men, women or children.

Jose Luis Cuevas, Mexican Consul for the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska, said officials with Union Pacific Railroad, which brought the cars to Denison, had given him the impression that the bodies had been in the car at least four months.

''I presume as soon as they have some type of a way to match the ID or to try to determine possible ID, then we'll follow up with Mexico to see if we can put a name to the person,'' Cuevas said.

''The loss of life is a real tragedy,'' Cuevas said.

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 had put them aboard a boxcar in El Paso and locked the door.

Temperatures in the boxcar reached 130 degrees and 18 men suffocated. The man who survived had punched a breathing hole in the floor with a railway spike.

-- Anonymous, October 15, 2002

Answers

This car was in some might hot places in the last four months. Poor people.

-- Anonymous, October 15, 2002

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