SAN ANTONIO — Thirty-four days after assisting with the school shooting in Uvalde, personnel with the San Antonio Fire Department and Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office were at site of the deadliest human-smuggling case in the country.
It was an unexpected blow.
"Realistically, it was, 'You got to be kidding me,'" Kimberley Molina said. "Because we just came off of one mass-fatality event. And we have another?"
Molina is the chief examiner at the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office. COVID-19, rising homicides and suicides, increased drug overdoses, and a bigger caseload of non-natural deaths were already weighing her staff down.
It all made for a hefty challenge considering her office was down four medical examiners. Still, Molina agreed to help process the 21 victims from the Uvalde.
Then June 27, 2022, happened.
"Got a phone call from dispatch that said that there was a migrant hot truck incident on Quintana Road," SAFD Chief Charles Hood said.
Hood recalled it was near dinner time when SAFD's Engine 52 responded to the 9600 block of Quintana Road. He described the desolate area with broken asphalt along railroad tracks.
"One of my command officers meets me, and he said, 'We have 46 dead,'" Hood said. "And I said, 'What did you say?'"
'Their outcomes were going to be grim'
The EMTs and paramedics triaged each body inside a tractor-trailer-turned-tomb for 53 migrants. Hood said the trailer had no cooling system, and the victims did not have water.
"You could hear people snoring; snoring to us is like agonal respirations. It's those last breaths that you take," he said. "And it was audible throughout that truck—the sounds of people in respiratory distress."
According to the fire chief, the victims would go into respiratory arrest as soon as his crews laid them on the ground.
"In a situation like that, you don't have enough resources to treat every single person," he said. "I'm trying to get them all extricated into a cooler environment."
On the scene, SAFD had 13 fire apparatus with 52 firefighters, 22 medics arriving on 11 EMS units, three battalion chiefs, and 13 command and support personnel.
The numbers could not overcome what crews had to face.
"We knew that we were not going to be able to save the majority of people," Hood said. "We were treating and transporting a lot of them. Their outcomes were going to be grim."
Sixteen were transported for critical emergency care. Seven of those would die, exacerbating the death toll.
Hood described it as cruelty. He said livestock receive better transport than what his eyes witnessed on Quintana Road one year ago.
"A bus wreck is an accident. A plane crashes, they're accidents," Hood said. "This is strictly a horror at its worst. And the lack of concern for a human being, it can't be illustrated more vividly than what we saw."
Help from elsewhere in Texas
Molina considers her office the "last responders."
Going into the Quintana Road scene, the members of her team prepared themselves even though it would be another emotionally taxing vent. Plus, they needed help.
"I asked for help with Quintana (Road) to some of the other medical examiner's offices," Molina said. "'I don't want to put my staff through this,' (she recalls saying). You know, 'Do you have staff? Do you have assistance that you can give us?'"
She said local physicians, along with reinforcements in Travis and Dallas counties, answered her distress call. They gathered teams to shift in and out around the clock, if necessary.
"And it's one by one," she said. "We treat everyone here with respect and with dignity."
According to Molina, the migrant deaths were the largest mass-fatality event her office had ever processed. Justice officials have called it the biggest human-smuggling case in U.S. history.
"I think for all of us, it's stressful. It's upsetting," she said. "As far as the work goes, I mean, we know our job. We know what we need to do."
Lingering memories
Hood said crews do not gawk at the dead, but his mind recalls distinct details like prayer cards at the scene.
"Chances are they were clutching onto that prayer card in the dark," Hood said. "In the heat. In the stench. In the unknown of people dying."
One victim's shoes stood out to Hood. He said it's a significant image from the dreadful day in his mind.
"I saw a young man with a brand new pair (of) Air Jordans on. Really nice Air Jordans. And I realized it was probably his prized possession," Hood said. "They were clean. They were new. They were nice. And, you know, this poor man died trying to find a better life. That stuck with me."
The fire chief said accused smugglers coated the truck with a meat tenderizer to hide human scents from dogs that might sniff the migrants out. Hood said he had to seek therapy to remove the smell from his head.
"I remember walking away being exhausted from what we had seen," he said. "It's going to be a day that, as a responder, you remember this the rest of your career—the rest of your life."
Molina's teams faced the challenge of identifying the victims when many carried no identification.
"We didn't know the countries of origin of a lot of the descendants," Molina said.
Relationships with consulates from Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras made the process easier. Within two weeks of the tragic discovery, the ME's office said 26 were citizens of Mexico, 21 were citizens of Guatemala and six were from Honduras.
The youngest victims were 13 years old, and the oldest was 55.
Hood said the victims suffered in their quest for a better life and to stay alive.
"There were scratch marks on the inside of the truck where they're trying to peel away the plywood," he said. "They're trying to open that truck up."
Hood said that when he drives near 18-wheelers now, questions about human-smuggling surface.
"It's my hope that none of my men and women will ever see anything as bad as what they saw on the 27th (of June, 2022)."
Firefighters transported nine victims who survived the journey.
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