SUSPICIOUS IMMIGRANT DEATHS IN S. TEXAS NOTHING NEW

By Juan Montoya
In October 12, 1998, six immigrants were reported killed when a southbound train 22 miles south of Sarita as they slept on the tracks. The reports at the time said that the six were sleeping on the tracks and did not hear the train approaching them in the dark.
Their bodies were so badly mangled that autopsies were deemed useless and the Mexican consul at Brownsville made arrangements for their remains to be shipped back to their places of origin.
At the time, the tragedy was described as an accident and ascribed the immigrants' inability to get off the tracks to exhaustion after trekking through the unforgiving brush and chaparral of South Texas.

But not everyone was convinced it was an accident. Several investigators for local attorneys (runners) thought that something more sinister was afoot after they learned of the deaths.
"How was it that not one of the six heard tons of steel coming down the track or even felt the vibrations on the rails?," asked one of the investigators at the time. "You can believe one or two, but that six people didn't hear the locomotive or rail cars making all that racket is not believable. They were probably dead already when they were laid on the tracks to cover it up."
When they approached the local attorney hired by the Mexican consulate in Brownsville to ask whether he wanted to look into it, he quickly sent them packing.
In the end, the Mexican consul accepted the accident story and made the arrangements for the transfer of the bodies.  

In the wake of a Texas Ranger investigation into the discover of more than 52 clandestine graves at a cemetery in Falfurrias containing the remains of unidentified immigrants who may have perished trying to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint along U.S. 281, interest in the death of the six near Sarita has been renewed.
In the Falfurrias case, when the researchers went out to the cemetery to begin the process of exhuming the bodies for testing they found bodies in bags and some exposed to the ground instead of fiberboard coffins as the funeral home said they were buried in. Body bags containing multiple bodies inside them were found near common household trash bags containing human remains.
Although the Ranger inquiry seems to be limited to the handling of the unidentified bodies that have been exhumed by anthropologists from Baylor University, one cannot discount the possibility that some of the deaths may have come as a result of foul play by local ranchers who decry the immigrants trespassing on their land.
For years, they have complained that the immigrants tear down their fences and litter their properties as they make their way north to be picked up by coyotes that will transport them to northers destinations like Houston, San Antonio and then beyond.
We have a suspicion that the 52 corpses found buried in Falfurrias are but the tip of the iceberg in the body count. And if it is true that the 1998 deaths were not an accident but rather a covered-up homicide by local cowboys, we may have stumbled onto an ongoing criminal enterprise by immigrant haters.