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At 10 p.m., May 13, 2003, a tractor-trailer crammed with at least 73 illegal immigrants left Harlingen. The immigrants came to Texas from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.

Thirty minutes into their trip toward Houston, the heat inside the airtight trailer became stifling. Some of the frantic and overheated adult males and teens removed shirts. They stripped a 5-year-old boy to his yellow underwear.

The temperature inside reached 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Many would soon die. The deadly four-hour trip ended in south Victoria County on the shoulder of Fleming Prairie Road. Nineteen died from suffocation, dehydration and hyperthermia. They died slow, painful, terrifying deaths. But the road they traveled – U.S. Highway 77 – lives.

The highway delivers illegal immigrants and channels drugs, crime and the hope of the world’s desperate. The highway still kills.

Together with U.S. Highway 59, it forms what Victoria County Sheriff T. Michael O’Connor calls the “Fatal Funnel.”

In an ongoing monthly series, the Victoria Advocate will explore that funnel, revisit the tragedy and examine what lessons were learned, as well as detail problems yet unsolved.

This we know: The immigrants weren’t the only ones who were forever changed. Many of your neighbors were changed, too.

One man's story

Richard Streeter’s high-pitched pager woke him.

The shrill tone turned to static. Then, as always, the pager fell briefly silent.

What followed he will never forget.

Victoria 911 dispatcher Kedre Parsons called for help:

A 5-year-old boy died in a trailer.

“Why page a volunteer paramedic for a death?” Streeter wondered. His wife of 24 years rustled beside him. Knowing she worries when he leaves at night, he offered few details.

Streeter rose. He grabbed his blue jumpsuit from the foot of his four-poster bed, his pager and radio. He closed his front door.

His pager buzzed again. His adrenaline pumped. He’d never heard his pager buzz again so soon.

As dispatchers learned details about the scene, they called for more help.

Pagers across the county buzzed. Cell phones rang.

Streeter climbed into his van. He drove one block to the Quail Creek Volunteer Fire Department. A flashing ambulance rounded a corner ahead of him.

He saw Dustin Ferguson run. Ferguson, another volunteer, lived across the street from the station. Fifteen volunteers from the station joined them.

Every county responder raced to the truck stop, the old Chubby’s, on Fleming Prairie Road at U.S. Highway 77.

Three of the department’s four vehicles had left the one-story fire department. Streeter went inside. He grabbed his blue helmet. His bunker gear, a fire suit that hangs from a hook near his nameplate, was gone. A rookie took it.

Streeter climbed into the passenger side of the brush truck, Quail Creek Brush 1202. Ferguson drove. The brush truck is a red Ford F-450 used to douse brush fires. Parked in the second bay this night, it held 350 gallons of water, backboards and other medical gear.

Streeter and Ferguson sped south on Chukar Street. They did not know what awaited them. Is it a toxic spill? Did a semi smash into an RV?

Streeter was groggy but alert. He monitored the radio. He wanted to be prepared.

Another page. The dispatcher’s voice was pitched, which worried Streeter.

All Lonetree and Raisin volunteer firefighters are required at the scene.

Three pages in 10 minutes. “We have a real mess,” he thought. “This is bad.”

Every paramedic gets the call, the one that changes his life. Would this be his?

At the 911 center, dispatchers knew the scene was grim. Details had trickled in from deputies at the truck stop. The dispatch room fell quiet.

For a few tense moments, dispatchers Parsons, Pat Cantu, Holly Jedlicka and Lori Kliem didn’t speak. What could they say? How would they explain what they knew?

Sadness hovered in the room.

Streeter and Ferguson turned right onto U.S. Highway 59 South and then left toward U.S. Highway 77, climbing to the top of the overpass. The truck’s lights whirled and the siren blared.

At night, the north and southeast horizons glowed. A thick darkness blanketed the middle ground.

On top of the overpass, Streeter saw emergency lights.

Another page. More units were dispatched.

They turned south at the Corpus Christi/Refugio exit. They regained their 80-mile-per-hour speed. Rescue vehicles streamed into the area. A sheriff’s deputy passed them.

Emergency lights flooded the fields.

Streeter’s truck stopped on the south side of Fleming Prairie Road. He was feet from the truck stop.

He’d been to this place before. Streeter, a chemistry teacher by day, once responded to a student who had a bad wreck there.

He opened his door. A deputy rushed him. “We need paramedics in there.”

The deputy pointed to a tractor-trailer. The rig was gone.

Streeter still did not know why he was there.

He saw the rookie who took his bunker gear, and demanded the suit back. Streeter dressed, heaved his 25-pound oxygen tank over his shoulders and fitted his mask.

The moon was almost full. Its glow mixed with flashing lights, chaos, yells and adrenaline.

Streeter lumbered to the 55-foot semi-trailer and down its side.

Fleming Prairie Road stretches southwest for two more miles before curving north. The trailer was on the road’s wide northern dirt shoulder.

Humidity clung to Streeter’s mask. At 75 degrees Fahrenheit with 90 percent humidity, his mask fogged. He turned the truck’s corner and faced the open cargo door.

The trailer’s floor was as high as his chest.

One look inside the trailer, and he finally knew why he was there.

“Nothing but a sea of bodies all the way to the back,” he said. “My heart just dropped. You could see the claw marks.”

A child’s death changes his life

Streeter didn’t have to answer the early-morning page. He isn’t paid to do so.

If his heart is big, this 48-year-old is much bigger. At 6-foot, 4-inches tall and 300 pounds, he looms over most. His voice is deep. But he is not intimidating.

He’s blunt. He’s funny, patient and active in his church, Our Lady of Victory.

He has short gray hair and a graying goatee.

Streeter has taught chemistry for 23 years, mostly at Memorial High School. Many students adore him. Streeter lives in the same house he did at the time of the tragedy. He sleeps in the same bed – on the right side.

He spoke from his home recently. He agreed to retrace his steps at the exact time he took them five years ago. When two journalists knocked on his door at 2 a.m., his heart pounded.

The thought of returning to the scene at night rattled him.

His wife, a psychologist, slept. Debra Streeter, 47, is 4-foot-11-inches tall and legally blind. She has 1 percent vision in her right eye.

If you hold a sipping straw at arm’s length and look through it to the other side, you can see about as well as she does.

Her husband only recently learned a living room light switch works. The home often remains dark. Light hurts his wife’s eye.

She also wears hearing aides. In college, she cut a hole in her mattress to bury an alarm clock. The alarm tone couldn’t wake her. She relied on the clock to rattle the bedsprings.

The college didn’t want her cutting into new bedsprings each year. So her bed traveled with her from dorm to dorm.

Richard Streeter, a resident assistant then, was tasked to find the mattress in storage among 400 others. Hers had a big “X” and a hole in the bottom. He brought it to room 222.

She had her vision then.

After a few weeks, they went on their first date. He proposed a day later – knowing she’d one day be blind.

After that page five years ago, his wife saw a change in her husband. Their son was about the same age then as the 5-year-old boy who died in the trailer.

The tragedy opened Streeter’s eyes to the students he teaches. He now sees minorities differently, his wife said.

He witnessed the struggle some Hispanics endure just to be here – a struggle many other students never face.

The Streeters have an 11-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter, two Seeing Eye dogs, an Australian shepherd-border collie mix, a calico and two gray cats – one of which has only one eye.

Streeter was first a volunteer firefighter in the late 1980s. He paid for paramedic school in 1990, the year their late daughter, Virginia Elizabeth Streeter, was born.

Their first-born had Edward’s syndrome, a disease deadlier than Down’s syndrome.

To keep her in the home, he needed medical training. Doctors wouldn’t allow it otherwise.

Virginia Elizabeth lived for three years, five months and 27 days. After her 1994 death, Streeter devoted his off-hours to responding to late-night pages.

“After her death, it’d be a waste not to be a paramedic,” he said.

He didn’t waste his chance to help again on May 14, 2003.

Although he had student evaluations to finish at 8 that morning, and children to drive to school, he rose as he’d done before.

This time, though, he’d never be the same.

He retraced every step he took that night. His memories remain vivid.

A mass casualty

Streeter’s oxygen tank usually held a 30-minute supply of air. But his heart rate quickened. He looked inside the trailer.

His oxygen mask muffled yells. “You got to get up. You got to get up there.”

Two other responders stood in the trailer.

Streeter placed a boot on the truck’s back step. He pushed against the weight of his gear. Before he could stand in the trailer, he was handed a body.

The man was dead. Streeter knew it from the feel of the dead weight. He laid the man on the ground.

He placed a boot on the step again. Another body was handed to him. The man’s weight turned Streeter to his right. He nearly dropped him. This man, too, was dead.

“The urban legend is they took two steps and died. That’s not true,” Streeter said. “They were dead.”

He climbed inside. Flashlights and emergency vehicles lit portions of the trailer’s inside.

He sifted through the bodies. Some were dead; some were alive. Many were stacked and naked from the waist up. Most wore blue jeans. Clothing was torn.

Some immigrants were in the fetal position. Some were on their back. Some were on their stomach. He’d never seen this many bodies.

His breath quickened. His air supply was running out.

Streeter bent at the hips and felt for heartbeats. He wore blue medic’s gloves. He felt the immigrants’ body heat through the gloves. “They were so hot to the touch,” he said.

The temperature inside the trailer reached greater than 170 degrees Fahrenheit – the temperature a roast’s interior reaches when it’s fully cooked.

Few bodies moved. He saw a spastic arm flail at the back of the trailer. The arm was hidden in darkness, but it caught a shred of light.

“Hey. Found one.”

He breathed hard. His vision narrowed. He sidestepped bodies.

Streeter’s oxygen supply drained. He’d gasped the tank dry. After responders moved the convulsing man to the ground, he joined the immigrant.

Streeter took his mask off. The morning air hit him for the first time in 12 minutes.

Some survivors huddled outside. Others fled to the fields or convulsed on the ground.

The 70-degree morning temperature was 100 degrees cooler than inside the trailer. Although the air was hot and muggy, this difference forced many survivors to shiver under blankets.

“They had a dead, lost look on their faces,” Streeter said.

Deputies found an immigrant hiding in the tall grass north of the truck. The immigrant crouched behind four concrete pillars that once supported a cistern.

Many of those who were still alive suffered from severe hyperthermia. For four hours they’d cooked, suffocated and dehydrated.

In the chaos and saved by his mask, Streeter hadn’t smelled the trailer. It reeked. Sweat, blood, vomit, feces and urine. The trailer floor was slippery with body fluids.

Many immigrants urinated from renal failure. Others urinated to quench an unimaginable thirst. Still others urinated into shirts to dampen and cool their feverish foreheads.

“This is your patient,” a scene commander told Streeter. His patient convulsed on the ground. Another immigrant lay near him. Joel Gomez treated the other.

The paramedics poured water on the men. They sliced saline bags when water bottles emptied.

Deputies’ strobe lights made movement seem exaggerated. A city ambulance drove a heart attack victim to a local hospital.

Streeter’s patient, a man in his mid-20s, convulsed. “He seized like crazy.” He was of a medium build and had short, black hair.

Then the patient calmed. Then he’d seize, bounce. He had a wild-eyed, scared look on his face. He spoke in mumbled Spanish. His seizures denied him any chance of receiving an IV.

Piles of empty water bottles and saline bags mounted on the road. Ice packs and ice cubes melted on the hot bodies. Responders placed the frozen packs on the immigrants’ armpits and groins.

Finally, an ambulance became available. Streeter and Gomez each pulled his patient onto backboards. The sweaty patients slid. Their skin was so wet that straps barely held them.

Once in the ambulance, Streeter and Gomez blasted the air conditioning.

The immigrants seized and vomited. Streeter suctioned vomit from his patient’s dry throat. He poured water and saline on the man. Gomez did, too. The immigrants were conscious.

“They would look at us,” Streeter said. “They would try to grab our hands.”

The ambulance reached DeTar Healthcare System’s emergency room. The patients were rushed inside – first Gomez’s and then Streeter’s.

Streeter was ordered to place his fire suit in a HAZMAT bag. The ambulance was disinfected. It all was covered in body fluids.

Streeter and Gomez waited at the hospital for more than an hour. The city needed support in case of another emergency.

Later, Streeter was told his patient lived. He never learned the man’s name.

Streeter returned to the scene. He helped clean the road, organize gear. Law enforcement scoured the fields for fleeing immigrants.

For about two hours he helped in any way he could.

Then he lifted his arm. He looked at his wrist. His watch told him he wouldn’t sleep this day. He had to get ready for his regular job.

After witnessing the horrors, he had children to ready for school and students to teach. He was released from the scene.

Life's lessons

Streeter walked into his chemistry classroom. His mind was elsewhere. He told his students a censored version of what he saw in the trailer.

“It was real difficult to do,” he said. “You can’t see that mass of human death in the back of a truck and not be affected by it. It’s not something I’ll ever forget.”

He turned on the TV. He knew the story would receive national news coverage. He knew the trailer would change him and his views about immigration.

That school day was a blur. He returned to the scene after class to a sea of satellite news trucks.

“Friends asked me why I’m sharing this story,” he said. “If we didn’t talk about the Holocaust, you’d forget it. Urban legends would grow. This is important for those 19 who died. I want their story told. The story needs to be reported forever.”

Maybe that’s why Streeter allowed journalists to visit his classroom recently. His current-day students knew little or nothing about what he saw at the trailer.

He is a caring, tough, straightforward teacher – much like you’d imagine him as a paramedic.

“He doesn’t realize how amazing he is,” one student said.

“He makes learning fun,” another said.

“He loves us.”

The teenagers call him Streeter, bypassing the formalities of a typical student-teacher relationship. They have his cell phone number. The teacher offers many chemistry lessons while he eats dinner at home.

Students continued to offer unsolicited praise.

Streeter became quiet. “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

‘The ovens at Auschwitz’

From the high school, Streeter can reach the deadly scene in about 15 minutes. He returned to the truck stop after teaching class on May 14, 2003.

He agreed to revisit that scene recently at 4 p.m., the same time he returned that fateful day five years ago.

He stood again in the middle of Fleming Prairie Road.

“This is strange. I was there. I don’t come out here that often, but I think about it every time I go by it. I can still visualize the truck,” he said. “Oh my, God. I’d never been to a mass casualty. The ovens at Auschwitz. That’s what it reminded me of.”

He thinks the tragedy heightened local law enforcement’s awareness of immigration. Arrests and chases are front-page news now, he said.

The tragedy changed him, too. He testified three times in Houston federal court. And now, when he drives highways, he looks at tractor-trailers for signs that immigrants are stuck inside.

He once blamed the immigrants for illegally entering the U.S. He thought they should all be rounded up and sent home.

“Do I shed tears over it? No. I’m not an emotional person. But it made me more compassionate. We need to crack down on the coyotes. It’s the coyotes who stuff these people in the back of a truck. It’s the coyotes who get pulled over and then try to flee. It’s the industry we need to stop. I did not think this before.”

He looked toward U.S. Highway 77. He remembers hearing the distant sirens become louder. He remembers the dozen or so deputies and troopers barking orders.

An old metal gate creaked.

He looked to the memorial. His hands were in his pockets. “You just don’t forget,” he said.

The memorial is an eerie, overgrown reminder of what happened five years ago.

A “No Parking” sign stands where the trailer was ditched.

Another stands 6 feet tall and reads: “In Memory of the 19 Immigrants Who Died May 14, 2003.”

More than 100 water bottles are scattered for about 29 feet east of the memorial sign, which looms over an aged barbed wire fence.

Dozens of 1-gallon jugs, and full bottles of Gatorade and soda, litter the ground near stuffed animals, wooden and metal crosses.

On one cross, $2.33 in U.S. change and 5 pesos were left as gifts. And the snacks – peanuts, jerky – a belated offering, perhaps.

Candles and necklaces and fake flowers barely poke through the weeds and wildflowers that grow through it all.

At the base of the weeds, hidden near an unopened beer bottle, is a little toy truck. It’s a Matchbox-sized reminder that a 5-year-old boy died in the trailer.

Tractor-trailers drive nonstop into the parking lot at the nearby truck stop.

A small, tattered cloth Mexican flag dangles from the fence. A watch looped over a barb reads 3:16.

Streeter walked from the road’s middle to the memorial. Many paramedics don’t last. It’s memories like these that become too much.

“This makes me remember just how evil people can be sometimes,” he said.

Contact Gabe Semenza, public service editor, at 361-580-6519 or gsemenza@vicad.com.fatalfunnel

The 19

Marco Antonio Villasenor

Jose Antonio Villasenor

Serafin Rivera

Roberto Rivera

Hector Ramirez

Elisendo Cabanas

Edgar Gabriel Hernandez

Juan Carlos Castillo

Ricardo Gonzalez

Oscar Gonzalez

Catarino Gonzalez

Juan Jose Morales

Mateo Salgado

Chelve Benitez

Roelio Dominguez

Jose Felicito Figueroa

Jose Mauricio Torres

Augusto Stanley Vargas

Jose Luis Ramirez

What is the Fatal Funnel?

From separate points on the U.S.-Mexico border, two highways begin. They wind through South Texas to Victoria County and beyond.

One roadway – U.S. Highway 59 – begins on the U.S. side of Nuevo Laredo. The other – U.S. Highway 77 – begins this side of Matamoros.

Victoria County Sheriff T. Michael O’Connor, whose department chases crime on both highways, dubbed the roadways the “Fatal Funnel.”

O’Connor cites the human, drug, weapon and money smuggling – and the desperation-laden death in the funnel – as reason to name it as such.

Natural borders make the funnel a logical route for immigrants and smugglers.

A gulf borders this funnel on its east side, and a treacherous desert touches it from the west.

While dangerous, this funnel is often the straightest path to Houston, a destination for many immigrants and a launching point for trips further inland for others.

In an ongoing monthly series, the Victoria Advocate will explore that funnel, revisit the tragedy of May 14, 2003, and examine what lessons were learned – as well as detail problems that still exist.

NEXT MONTH:

A look inside the trailer, at the chase for those who fled and at how dozens of other first responders coped with that horrific morning.