4 killed, 3 injured in smuggling crash near U.S.-Mexico border

Four people were killed and three others were seriously injured when an overloaded vehicle being pursued by Border Patrol agents slammed into a tractor-trailer Thursday morning, cops said.

The driver was suspected of human smuggling and trying to evade Border Patrol in South Texas on Thursday morning, Texas state police said.

The fleeing Jeep was carrying seven people total when it struck the parked truck outside a Love’s Travel Stop in Encinal, about 30 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the Laredo Morning Times reported.

Four male passengers — two from Guatemala, one from Mexico and one from an unknown location — were killed in the crash, according to the Morning Times. Two other men, one from Guatemala and one from Mexico, were injured. The driver, a U.S. citizen and the suspected smuggler, was also hospitalized.

Border Patrol began chasing the Jeep down Interstate 35, and it desperately attempted to exit in Encinal, a small 500-person town about 110 miles south of San Antonio, the Morning Times reported. Police said the driver lost control and slammed into the trailer of a parked 18-wheeler.

No one in the tractor-trailer was injured.

The accident came in the same week 53 people died in a smuggling operation when they were left to roast in the back of an 18-wheeler in San Antonio. About a dozen people remain hospitalized, and four men have been arrested in that case.

Migrant car crashes are also distressingly common. In March 2021, 13 people died when an overloaded van collided with a tractor-trailer in Southern California. Two months later, eight people in a pickup truck died in a head-on collision in South Texas.

With News Wire Services