As Christopher Sherman reports for the Associated Press, at least 14 people died in a truck accident last Sunday involving a Ford pickup truck that went off the road and crashed into the trees. The accident happened in South Texas, in Goliad County, on U.S. Highway 59, roughly 90 miles southeast of San Antonio.
The Texas Department of Public Safety will need a week or more to figure out what happened, but given that it was a single-vehicle accident, and the pickup truck went off the road, it’s easy to speculate that the driver was sleepy behind the wheel, though it could just as easily have been a loss of control because of overloading.
As Sherman reports, one police officer said, “This is the most people I’ve seen in any passenger vehicle, and I’ve been an officer for 38 years.”
The wrinkle in this case is the overloaded pickup truck itself, which appears to have been carrying 15 immigrants, who appear to have been smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border. The victims’ ages range from 8 years old to 30 years old, and their bodies were found in the cab of the truck, as well as in the bed and surrounding area.
Source: Authorities trying to ID 14 killed in Texas crash