SAN ANTONIO — One of the several suspects charged in connection with last year's smuggling tragedy – in which 53 migrants died in an overheated and cramped semitruck discovered in San Antonio – pleaded guilty to multiple charges on Wednesday, exactly 15 months after the discovery was made along Quintana Road.
As a result of the plea, 29-year-old Christian Martinez has been convicted of conspiring to transport migrants resulting in injury and transportation of migrants resulting in death, among other charges. He's expected to be sentenced on Jan. 4, and faces the possibility of life in prison.
An initial indictment from July 2022 accused Martinez of taking another suspect, Homero Zamorano Jr., to the San Antonio location where Zamorano would eventually pick up the empty tractor-trailer he's accused of driving with dozens of dying migrants inside.
At least 66 people who authorities said were in the U.S. by illegal means were being transported in the tractor-trailer before Zamorano allegedly abandoned it on the southwest side on June 27, 2022. Authorities arrived to find dozens of the migrants – who came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere – suffering from heat-related illness, launching a federal investigation as well as a manhunt for the smugglers.
The victims were as young as 13 and as old as 55. Among them were more than a dozen women. The 2022 incident is considered the deadliest human-smuggling event in U.S. history.
Several other suspects connected to the incident are at various stages of the justice process, including Zamorano. The others include Riley Covarrubias-Ponce, Felipe Orduna-Torres and Luis Alberto Rivera-Leal, who are accused of planning the retrieval and handoff of the tractor-trailer to Zamorano.
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