Araceli Velasquez wrote messages in Spanish to her daughter as if Yadira, 16, was still in her room streaming her favorite Northern music from karaoke speakers, dressed in makeup, reviewing Facebook.
Those two months without you were the hardest of my life . . . Beautiful girl, my princess, I love you, my life . . . . . . You have taken everything, my life, here nothing makes sense, take me with you my love, do not be cruel, I need to be with you . . . . I love you forever, mommy princess . . . (here) your favorite photo, I love you baby if God gave me this selection of my life for yours, I would change it in the blink of an eye . . . My precious angel.
The parents of el Paso’s four teenagers killed in a turn of fate after a high-speed chase through the border patrol in June face a mountain of pain and many open questions: Why were their children in a car after 2 a. m. , when another six allegedly, people illegally crossed the U. S. -Mexico border What did they know?How did this come about?
“That’s what’s so troubling,” said Hilario García, Yadira’s stepfather. “That’s the consultation we’ve made to ourselves so far. You can only speculate. There are so many scenarios. “
The horrendous accident in downtown El Paso on June 25 at 2:15 a. m. killed seven people. It is transparent that they died of violent death in the complex logistics business that is human trafficking, where the “cargo driver” who takes migrants to the Border is an amateur, young man, who needs money fast, according to a review of dozens of court documents.
It is a misdemeanor under federal law, nonviolent, punishable by a sentence that rarely exceeds two years, but at borders, where such collection occurs day after day, it is a priority of more sensible law enforcement, the subject of sharp operations and dozens of prosecutions each month.
The stories of those who died began hours and days earlier with possible options, fueled by the currency depression on both sides of the border, that would put them on a fatal collision course between themselves and the law.
Wednesday, June 24, 8 p. m. (about six hours after the accident).
Gustavo Cervantes had intervened with his cousin for three days in a row to enter. The concert was easy, he kept saying: choose some other people at the border. He makes $150 a head.
Cervantes, 18, had dropped out of Irvin High School in the Northeast, had struggled in the house since his parents separated a few years earlier and lived with his cousin in a cell home in the Lower Valley.
The cousin, an old man in his 20s, spoke on the phone with El Paso Times last August on an anonymity condition due to the confidentiality of the data he shared. Your call used to protect your identity.
This isn’t the first time one of us has answered.
Gustavo had done it at least once before, said his cousin; So does he. They fell into it because they lived “a life of bully, ” as he said. I smoked, drunk. They met other people who gave them away.
About $150 to $200 for a pickup. 100 to “store” other people at home, according to the head and according to the day, the cousin said. Recently, Cervantes made a $3,000 offer to move an organization to one of the Border Patrol offices. city road checkpoints. His cousin convinced him not to take that one; too many risks, he said.
This summer afternoon last June, his cousin and a new friend, Jorge Acosta, had spent time together. There would be a pick-up past sleep at night. Cervantes listened to his cousin to come.
“I know Gustavo did it once before and it went well, ” said the cousin. “The mentality that it’s going to work well. I said, “You’re stupid!Don’t do that. ” He had monetary disorders and used to. All right, you know. But I still have a feeling something bad is going to happen. I said, “Something’s wrong. “
He said, “Everything’s going to be okay. ” “
Cervantes suffered to find a solid job, his cousin said, and needed money.
But his cousin told him he was tired and didn’t need to pass out.
Cervantes departed in his silver Chevrolet Cruze.
Wednesday, June 24, 10 p. m. (approximately 4 hours before the accident)
Gomez headed for the rocky slopes of the mountain. Christ the King about two hours after sunset, when the darkness on the mountain separating El Paso and Juarez was absolute, except for the glare of the city lights around his hem.
He walked with two people, Oscar García Bran, 21, from Guatemala and Omar Coyoy, 18, from Mexico, every 40 minutes, five rested.
“We would avoid when we saw the migration lights” – border agents walking with lanterns, or the headlights of their white and green SUVs – “and we would start walking back when we saw nothing,” Gomez told El Paso Times in a telephone interview about U. S. immigration and customs detention in August.
That night was a moment of the 2643-mile adventure from his home in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, to St. George, Utah, where he hoped to locate his wife, who had successfully made the trip in 2017, said and was Waiting for her.
The 3 men reached the most sensitive of the mountain near the white cross which, for decades, attracted devoted pilgrims from both sides of the border to its summit, it is also a known and harmful smuggling route. , he said, came here through some other organization of 3.
Now there are six of them, coming down the mountain.
When they got to the base – U. S. territory – “We don’t wait more than 10 minutes for the car that picked us up,” he said.
Wednesday, June 24, 8:10 p. m.
Trapped at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, Yadira Barrera was locked up most of spring and summer with her mother, Araceli Velasquez, stepfather Hilario García, her 4-year-old twin sisters and her 14-year-old brother.
She’s the dest and “in a tortuous way, she likes her mom,” Garcia said. Barrera watched the young men as their parents worked, their mom as an optometrist technique and their stepfather as a musician.
Barrera was the awakening of the family, awakening the space with his music in the mornings, broadcasting from the 80s and 90s to country and Mexican melodies, she was made up, she was so intelligent in this domain that she was asked to wear it. makeup for quinceañeras and weddings, and then gathered the young men for a “photo shoot” outside, Velasquez said.
“She’s very noisy, ” said Garcia, providing outlandish things that would make us laugh. She’s so beautiful. She can just walk into a room and soften it.
On Wednesday, he asked his mother if he could date Gustavo Cervantes and his girlfriend, Liliana Jiménez, and his friend, Jorge Acosta, and they would hang out on Scenic Drive, an emblematic road in the Franklin Mountains that offers wide prospects of Juarez and El Paso and sewing where they are.
From the viewpoints of the road, popular with tourists to take photographs and for teenagers as a meeting place, it is difficult to know where the United States ends and where Mexico begins.
“I had permission to pass there, ” said Velasquez. ” I tried to give her a curfew, at 10:30 at night, but she called and said, “Could you let me stay a little?”
Velasquez gave in and he’s fine.
She fell asleep, then woke up at 1 a. m. and his daughter.
“It’s time to go home, ” he said.
Thursday, June 25, 1:36 a. m. and 1:48 a. m. (41 minutes 29 minutes before the accident)
Barrera posted video clips to his Snapchat social media account.
Smiling liliana with blond curls and a brown and white baseball jersey in what appears to be a Scenic Drive lookout, El Paso and Juarez’s lighting fixtures stretched like a blanket in the desert below.
Barrera and Acosta in a car, she in a tank top, her incredibly long and curved lashes; Lying with a Puma sweatshirt and sports pants, heavy eyelids.
Wednesday, June 24 (one day the accident)
“When Central America hears smuggling (of people), it thinks of a ruthless man who takes them from Central America to their country,” said Victor Manjarrez Jr. , Chief of Sector of the Retired Border Patrol and Associate Director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso.
But the logistics of illegal activity to move others across borders and countries to the United States mimics that of a global legal chain of sources. The truth is that human trafficking requires a complex and complicated system, he said.
A migrant leaving Guatemala can pay a trafficker on the Mexican border or pay for data on the most productive position to cross without being noticed. In Mexico, migrants can pay others for a ticket to a city border such as Juarez, Tijuana. Or Nogales.
There, at the starting point of the border, there are other people waiting at bus stations and exercise stops: “They are for other people who pass to El Norte. This user is not the consultant, but the facilitator. “
They will be taken to a hideout in Mexico before they are transferred to the border and where they will pass.
“When other people arrive,” he says, “they buy and sell like a commodity. “
In the AmericanArray is where the law begins to show its weight, with the first link of the human trafficking chain in the north of the border: the so-called “cargo driver”.
Every week, in federal courthouses from Del Rio to El Paso in West Texas, prosecutors impose fraudulent fees that oppose those who send undocumented immigrants from the border to homes, motels, or their destinations in the North, East and West.
The rate is known as 1324, a misdemeanor described in the US code. As “reckless by the fact that a foreigner came, entered and remained in the United States in violation of the law, made a shipping vacation and attempted to send and move a foreigner to the United States for that violation of the law. “
“There are young people driving, ” said Manjarrez. ” They’re much younger than they were years ago. This can simply be the appeal of simple money. “
“Several times, those drivers had a friend or a member of a circle of family members who had already done so,” he said. “They will say, “All you have to do is look at them and take them away. “
Thursday, June 25, around 2 a. m. (15 to 20 mins before the crash)
Fifteen minutes spread like a deck of cards in a damaging game.
The El Paso Police Department’s investigation into the turn of destination is ongoing, as is an investigation through National Security Investigations into the smuggling attempt. The Paso Times compiled the following main points with data collected from Gomez, text messages sent to friends through Barrera, the Border Patrol press release, and the EPPD traffic incident report.
The collection occurred near the base of Christ the King Mountain in Sunland Park, N. M. , according to documents from the Border Patrol.
Gomez said he had climbed to the back of the entire Chevy Cruze on the right side. The adventure was intended to be for 3 other people, but the migrants had arrived in teams of six; now there were 10 other people in the little silver sedán.
While Cervantes was driving, a Border Patrol van fell, Gomez said. The van temporarily stopped to the right and let the Chevy in, then parked it. After about 10 minutes, the Border Patrol officer turned on the vehicle lights.
Cervantes stopped.
Paisano is parallel to the rusty metal fence on the edge of the Rio Grande curve. Although operations change, Border Patrol officers are stationed every guard or 800 meters in the region, home to Texas, New Mexico and the state of Chihuahua in Mexico.
Cervantes traveling east, with the border fence and the river to his right, Juarez literally a stone’s throw to the south. Border Patrol cars began to fit into the Chevrolet, in the back, left and right, Gomez said, seven cars in total.
Cervantes accelerated. He lit a light.
A border patrol manager “ended the chase almost as soon as it started,” leader Gloria Chávez said in a statement.
“The driving force began to lose the car,” Gomez said. “My teammates started screaming” No!” Everyone was screaming.
“That’s when I felt the shock. “
The border patrol, he said, about a hundred yards behind. At least one officer close enough to see what had happened. The El Paso Police Traffic Report referred to Border Patrol Officer J. Bido as a witness.
Thursday, August 27, 1 p. m. (63 days after the accident)
Border patrol officials refused to publish the agency’s policy on vehicle prosecutions, a CBP spokesman on Tuesday showed El Paso Times that the policy was “under review” before the fatal June 25 accident.
“An announcement is on the horizon,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The prosecution of the deadly Border Patrol. A joint investigation last year through ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times found that in the four years until 2018, in the American aspect of the border, at least 250 others were injured and 22 were killed after a chase. border patrol.
That number does not come with the other seven people who died in the turn of El Paso’s fate in June, nor with two other people who died as a result of a border patrol chase in Yuma, Arizona, in March, reportedly through ProPublica and The Times, every nine days, on average, the border patrol prosecution ends in a turn of destination.
Law enforcement agencies across the country have modernized their prosecution policies for more than 30 years, moving away from high-speed prosecutions as has arisen about the dangers to officials and communities.
Some of the country’s largest police departments, including New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, use high-speed court proceedings and make their policies publicly available.
The Border Patrol did not disclose its policy because the company does not need criminal organizations to have sensitive information, according to CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan.
“A local police force, and what they’re facing, is very different from what the border patrol faces around them,” CBP’s Morgan said in a phone interview on August 26 on a stopover on the border wall in El Paso. “We want to strike that balance between being transparent and making sure we don’t provide bad guys with a roadmap on how they can avoid us. “
The probability of a poor outcome in a high-speed chase is high, said Dennis Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, who has investigated law enforcement prosecution policies.
“There are 3 things that can happen: the player may run out of gas, surrender or break. These are the options,” he said.
“It’s a balance between the threat – it requires a complex calculation of road conditions, traffic and population density – and the desire to apprehend,” he said. “I think they will locate prosecution on the grounds of a crime or is prohibited or discouraged. The desire to apprehend is high. The Border Patrol would say this [kind of human trafficking] is a bachelor agreement. “
Border Patrol managers “cancel” a chase before a turn of destination occurs. In the event of the June turn of destination, Gloria Chavez, head of the Border Patrol in the El Paso area, said: “A border patrol manager tracking the radio ended the chase almost as soon as it began. “
Chávez’s public affairs workplace said the same thing about a lawsuit that ended in a turn of destination a month later, on July 24, without injuries: “Due to the vehicle’s top speed and heavy road traffic, a scene manager promptly ordered officials. Soon after, officials discovered that the vehicle had been involved in a twist on the fate of a single vehicle. “
High-speed car prosecutions are not “a deadly force,” Kenney said, yet law enforcement agencies “consider the calculation to be similar because the threat of poor results runs. “
Kinney said his studies showed that once the suspects “have escaped,” they slow down. Law enforcement agencies have been artistic in fleeing a lawsuit in favor of following other approaches.
The NYPD, for example, will launch a helicopter chase to track down dangerous fugitive suspects. Kenney said new technologies are also being tested, such as firing a GPS tracking dart at the fleeing vehicle.
On the night of the chase that ended with one of the deadliest injuries in El Paso’s recent memory, the border patrol sought to prevent a driving force from fleeing in what officials had already decided to be “a suspicious vehicle with many passengers. “that had left “a domain that is known for its foreign smuggling activity. “
Many lives are at stake.
Wednesday, June 24, 7 p. m. (about seven hours the accident)
Patricia Torres said goodbye to her son around 7 p. m. , asked if she would come home that night or stay with a friend.
“No, Mom, I’ll be home tonight, ” he said, “I’ll leave you when I get back. “
“Go well, I love it, ” he said. Hold on tight.
She had been with him in weasyy and bad times and bad times. When she and her father split up, he had gotten out of control, left, and she couldn’t locate him. After the third time he fled at the age of 16. , spent nine months in juvenile detention.
But they maintain their constant relationship. It was time to get his life back on track, move on, he said. He told her he knew she was right. He planned to enroll in the Navy, he said.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. Anxiety washed over her chest and she took a tablet to calm herself, she said. The next morning, around 7 a. m. , he won a call from his mother. There was an accident.
Torres checked her son’s room, empty, she in the hospitals of the city, nothing.
Then he called the local police station. There was a car accident, a dispatcher told him.
She, her mother and sister got in the car and headed to the turning point of fate.
Seven other people had died, a police officer told him. Torres told the officer that his son would be easily recognizable through his tattoos: “Cervantes” on his chest and a rose in his left hand.
The officer’s quiet, serious.
The last thing he remembers that morning is his words: “Your son is one of them. “
A monument on the sidewalk, ”pain in your soul”
Tuesday, September 1 at noon
Deflated balloons sway over the makeshift memorial on a chain mesh fence sewn with barbed wire in the center of Wicker Tire Co. Bouquets of sun-dried roses. More than a hundred candles melt in their glass jars, their photographs of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe fade away.
But the memories of their children, killed in adulthood, do not fade over time, they are sharp as knives in the palm of one hand.
“I just need to sleep the day, and in the middle of the night I don’t sleep at all,” Mónica Frausto, Liliana’s mother, said in a Text message in Spanish. “She was my baby and I saw her as my little wife I had to shield and I swear I did. I don’t know where I failed.
Adriana Acosta, Jorge’s mother, prays to God by force.
“It was horrible,” he said. “And today is one of the days when I just need to cry and say, ‘Why are you here, why can’t you go back? “” We never have a fence. They are our children, he told the other parents. It’s like a nightmare. I need to wake up and say, “This doesn’t happen. We don’t live that way. ” But we are. We’re. “
Torres feels the same sense of disbelief. She talks to Gustavo in her pictures. You can’t wash the dirty laundry you left in your room. The family circle celebrated its 19th birthday on August 31 at Mount Carmel Cemetery where he is buried.
“I try to be strong for him because he didn’t like to see me cry,” he said. “I know you’re better, because you’ve suffered so much. I had so much pain in my soul. “
In the midst of pain, questions arise.
Responses from official resources have been complicated as many law enforcement agencies continue to investigate what happened. The Paso Times requested submission and other public documents, but applications were denied due to ongoing investigations.
CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility is internally investigating the role of the Border Patrol in the run-up to the accident; The report will be delivered to the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security for review, CBP Morgan’s acting commissioner said.
Araceli Velasquez enters Yadira’s empty room, publishes shots of his ‘bathrough’, his ‘princess’, and listens to Northern Mexican music, better understood through a damaged heart.
See a search
A little corner in the sky
To hide you and me
I’m going to look
A little bit in paradise
Where you and I can hide
Velasquez posted a canopy of Ramon Ayala’s song on Facebook, with a message to his daughter, “Until we meet again, my love Array. “
Daniel Borunda contributed to this report dborunda@elpasotimes. com.
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@elpasotimes. com.
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