“They were crammed in there”

The weekend discovery of a dozen undocumented immigrants concealed in the floor of a flatbed utility trailer on IH-35 has local law enforcement drawing comparisons with a recent similar incident.

In a case that developed shortly after 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 14, the US Border Patrol notified the La Salle County Sheriff’s Office that a vehicle traveling between Cotulla and Gardendale had raised agents’ suspicions and that the Ford F-350 work truck and its gooseneck flatbed trailer had been tracked since passing through Webb County.

The report indicated that a pickup truck driver had cut through a series of ranch gate locks between Webb and La Salle counties, possibly in an attempt to circumvent a border-region inspection station and law enforcement observers on rural routes.

Sheriff’s deputies converged on the vehicle alongside the USBP agents who had effected a traffic stop for an immigration inspection.

Joining Cpl. Jose Avila and Cpl. Hector Rodriguez at the scene near Milemarker 77 beside the interstate’s northbound lanes, La Salle Sgt. Richard Gonzales said the vehicle and trailer appeared to look like traditional South Texas work equipment. Even the driver, he said, was dressed in work clothes, with a shirt identifying him as “Kevin” from a company called T&D Solutions.

The driver has been identified as Rolando Worsham, 44, of Freer.

Two passengers in the back seat of the work truck were identified as undocumented immigrants.

Officers examining the truck and trailer noted that the flatbed’s license plates were not only inappropriate for a pickup-hauled trailer but had been made with stickers.

“That was a clue right there,” Sgt. Gonzales said. “Wrong plates, and they were homemade.”

The sergeant said he noted at the time that the scene closely resembled one of only two weeks previously, when officers had stopped a utility truck that had been cloned to resemble a state transportation department vehicle.

In the May 30 case, he said, undocumented immigrants had been locked into the cloned truck’s utility toolboxes.

Officers quickly noted a second similarity to the earlier case. The Ford pickup truck they had stopped had once been listed as a lease vehicle operated by the Halliburton company in the energy industry and then sold at an auction with no new registered owner.

“This was a situation like the cloned truck,” Sgt. Gonzales said. “That vehicle had once been a lease, too, and it had been sold at an auction.”

It was while they were assessing the vehicle and its trailer that officers heard sounds coming from the flatbed.

“We thought it might be voices,” the sergeant said. “We couldn’t be sure, but there was something going on.

“We looked under the floor, and we could see body parts through a gap between the floorboards and the trailer chassis. There were people in there. They were crammed in there.”

Gonzales noted that a closer inspection of the flatbed floor showed that some of its planks had been secured with what appeared to be fresh bolts.

“We began lifting the floorboards and we found twelve people,” the sergeant said. “All of them were adults. All of them were identified as undocumented immigrants and all were taken into Border patrol custody, along with the driver.”

Interviews with the passengers have revealed the 12 in the trailer and two in the truck cab had been concealed in the rig for more than an hour. None appeared to have suffered injury, according to the sheriff’s office.

“We are tracking some of these smuggling trends, and we are familiar with some of the methods being used to disguise vehicles,” the sergeant said.

The La Salle County Sheriff’s Office recently took delivery of two additional license plate reading devices that have been deployed with one purchased in 2024, positioned along routes believed popular with smugglers.

The devices are capable of photographing vehicle license plates and transmitting the information to the sheriff’s office and to officers patrolling outlying areas of the county, according to Sheriff Hector Ramirez, thereby providing vital information on traffic and helping identify suspicious vehicles.