The white Ford pickup was rolling at about 80 miles per hour on the highway near the border.
"The boy was talking on the phone, and since he had already zigzagged twice, I told him: 'This man cannot drive the car," recalls Jose, one of the 30 migrants who were traveling in the vehicle this Wednesday when the accident occurred. fatal in Texas.
"About seven kilometers away the van began to shake and [the driver] went off the street, then he braked and that's when we turned two laps and went to hit a stop post," he said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo .
José, a 29-year-old immigrant from Honduras who preferred not to give his real name for fear of retaliation, survived.
The driver and nine other people were killed and more than a dozen injured in the brutal crash, which nearly split the vehicle in two near the Encino community.
José, a Honduran migrant who survived a fatal truck accident in Encino, Texas;
on August 4, 2021 Courtesy
There were 27 men and three women in the truck, most of them from Honduras, although there were also several Mexicans and a few Guatemalans, according to Brooks County authorities.
After the impact, the grass around the crashed truck filled with bodies and blood.
"People were screaming, I took two [out of the car], one of them had his foot broken," José said, recalling the chaos after the crash.
10 immigrants die when the van they were traveling in overturned in Texas
Aug. 5, 202102: 58
"I tried to rescue my friend, but when I saw him that his neck was dismembered, I no longer did anything.
I
caught myself
running and as three other boys followed me," says the migrant, originally from Tegucigalpa, a place he assures he cannot return for threats.
An immigration agent found José in the mountains, wounded in the head and with a split lip.
He was taken to a hospital, where he was told that he had suffered internal blows to his skull and hip.
When asked how he feels now, José indicates that he has pain in his head and body, but adds: "We are in 100 spirits to move on."
The Encino, Texas, crash site of a pickup truck carrying 25 people believed to be migrants. Codi via Twitter
His journey has been very complicated, he says.
He was kidnapped in Mexico after US immigration authorities returned him to Reynosa
, Tamaulipas, when he tried to cross the Rio Grande near McAllen, Texas.
There he became friends with Jorge, the migrant who died in the crash in Encino.
"They kidnapped us for five months, with the boy who fell apart. They asked us for ransom, they asked my sister $ 5,000 so they could let me go. And they asked him the same thing," he says.
José's plan was to go around the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias, about three miles from the crash site, and then "get to a certain part where a car was going to lift us."
But death got in his way.
[The truck with 25 people that crashed in California crossed a breach in the wall, according to the Border Patrol]
The white Ford pickup truck that crashed while carrying 30 people in Encino, Texas;
on August 4, 2021.Damià Bonmatí
Preliminary investigation by the Corpus Christi Department of Public Safety indicates that the van “attempted to turn right at an unsafe speed” from an outside lane, thus “veering off the road by hitting a metal utility pole and the signal stop ".
At least 20 injured have been taken to medical centers in McAllen and Corpus Christi, some of them by helicopter due to the severity of their injuries.
Four are in critical condition.
The fatalities were six Hondurans, three Mexicans and one Guatemalan, Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martínez explained to Noticias Telemundo.