HOUSTON, March 23 -- A truck driver was convicted Wednesday for his role in the deaths of 19 illegal immigrants who clawed at the walls of his sweltering tractor-trailer and screamed for air as he smuggled them across Texas.
The 2003 journey was the deadliest human-smuggling attempt in U.S. history.
Truck driver Tyrone Williams, 34, leaves the courthouse in Houston. He was spared the death penalty.
(Pat Sullivan -- AP)
|
|
Tyrone Williams, 34, was found guilty on 38 counts of transporting illegal immigrants but was spared the death penalty because the jury could not agree on whether he bore direct responsibility for the deaths.
The judge also declared a mistrial on 20 counts of conspiracy and harboring after the jury deadlocked on those charges during 2 1/2 days of deliberations. One of those charges also carried the death penalty.
Williams, who smiled when he learned he would not face the death penalty, could get life in prison.
Prosecutors said during the nine-day trial that Williams was paid $7,500 by a smuggling ring to transport more than 70 illegal immigrants from Harlingen to Houston in May 2003. The refrigeration unit on Williams's trailer was not turned on for the trip, and authorities said temperatures inside reached 173 degrees.
Survivors testified that as the heat in the trailer became unbearable, the immigrants took off their sweat-drenched clothes and crowded around holes they punched in the truck so they could breathe. They also kicked out a signal light to try to get the attention of passing motorists.
Prosecutors said that Williams ignored the immigrants' screams and their banging on the sides of the truck and that he even called the operators of the smuggling ring on his cell phone to demand more money because he feared they would damage his rig.
Williams eventually abandoned the trailer about 100 miles southwest of Houston after opening the doors and finding some of the immigrants lying in the trailer. He was arrested a few hours later at a Houston hospital.
Seventeen people, including a 5-year-old boy, died inside the trailer of dehydration, overheating and suffocation. Two others died later.
U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore set an April 11 hearing on whether to retry Williams on the 20 deadlocked counts, but no sentencing date was set.
Defense attorneys argued that although Williams was guilty of transporting the immigrants, the ring's other members were responsible for the deaths because they packed too many people into the trailer.
Defense attorney Craig Washington said that Williams could not understand the immigrants' pleas because he does not speak Spanish, but that when Williams found out what was happening, he bought 55 bottles of water at a truck stop and shoved them through the hole in the trailer.
But Fatima Holloway, who rode along with Williams, said she pleaded with him to help the immigrants sooner. She said both of them could hear the immigrants banging on the sides of the trailer.
Williams, a Jamaican citizen who lives in Schenectady, N.Y., was the only one of 14 defendants in the case to face the death penalty. Federal law allows capital punishment in fatal smuggling cases.
Two other defendants were convicted of smuggling charges in December and are awaiting sentencing. Five others have pleaded guilty. One man remains a fugitive.
