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(Update) Trailer deaths in TX, and the IA connection

News

July 25th, 2017 by Ric Hanson

Mexico’s foreign ministry says that “according to preliminary information” 25 of the migrants inside a sweltering tractor-trailer in Texas were Mexican. A ministry statement issued Monday night said that based interviews by Mexican consulate personnel and contact with local authorities “we can say that of the 10 people who lost their lives … four were of Mexican nationality.” The statement also said that of the 29 people hospitalized, 21 are Mexican. The tractor-trailer was found parked outside a Walmart in San Antonio. The people were discovered inside early Sunday. The driver, James Matthew Bradley Jr., now faces a federal human smuggling charge that carries the possibility of the death penalty.

Bradley, and Pyle Transportation Inc., of Schaller, the northwest Iowa trucking company he was driving for, both claim they don’t know how or when the illegal immigrants got into the trailer. Bradley called his fiancee Sunday from a jail more than 1,000 miles from home and briefly described the gruesome events. Darnisha Rose says James Matthew Bradley Jr., who she called a generous person, claimed he had no idea how so many people came to be crammed inside his trailer in the Texas heat.

The 60-year-old Bradley, a diabetic whose criminal history includes a conviction in a felony domestic violence case, told Rose that he’d stopped his truck at a San Antonio Walmart and went inside to use the bathroom. He claimed that when he returned to his truck, he noticed the trailer rocking back and forth.
He said he’d heard nothing before that.