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By JUAN A. LOZANO
HOUSTON (AP) - Two of the more than 70 illegal immigrants who were trapped in a sweltering, nearly airless tractor-trailer testified against the driver Thursday, with one describing the thud of falling bodies as people died around him in the darkness.
Asked how long he believed he was in the trailer, one witness, Jose Juan Roldan Castro, replied, "For me, it was centuries.''
The immigrants testified Thursday on the third day of the trial of Tyrone Williams, who drove and abandoned the big rig and could face the death penalty if convicted for his role in the deaths of 19 of the immigrants in May 2003.
Roldan, who was smuggled from Mexico, said he listened as others began dying and their bodies fell.
"At that point, I was in bad shape. My head was bursting. I could no longer breathe,'' said Roldan, 38, who spoke in Spanish through an interpreter.
Roldan said as the heat became unbearable, he and the other immigrants took off their sweat-drenched clothes and crowded around holes they punched out of the truck so they could breathe.
When prosecutors asked if he wanted to get out of the vehicle, Roldan responded: "Who would want to be inside that truck, inside that hell?''
Prosecutors say Williams ignored immigrants' screams for help during the four-hour journey, abandoning the airtight trailer with its doors shut at a truck stop in Victoria, about 100 miles southwest of Houston. Seventeen people died inside the trailer and two others died later.
Williams' attorneys say he is guilty of transporting the immigrants but is not responsible for their deaths because he didn't know they were dying.
Roldan said that early in the journey, he punched a hole through one of the rear brake lights to create an air hole, even though other illegal immigrants who feared being apprehended yelled and hit him.
"I told them, 'Don't you understand? We run the risk of losing our lives.' When people realized (that) they began making another hole,'' Roldan testified.
Roldan said that when the trailer passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint, the immigrants remained quiet even though the heat already had become unbearable. He said the smugglers had told them they'd get out shortly after passing the checkpoint.
The meager air passing through the holes in the trailer couldn't prevent many of the immigrants from dying. The first death - that of a 5-year-old boy - sent a wave of panic through the group, Roldan said.
Craig Washington, Williams' lead attorney, has said his client couldn't understand the immigrants' pleas because he doesn't speak Spanish, but that Williams gave them water as soon as he found out what was happening.
Eloy Garcia, a clerk at the Victoria truck stop, testified Thursday he sold Williams 55 bottles of water that he gave to the immigrants before the trailer was abandoned.
Garcia said he called 911 after a shirtless immigrant came into his store, saying he was thirsty and that a Salvadoran was trying to kill him. Prosecutors have described that immigrant as delirious.
Shortly after the call, Williams and Fatima Holloway, who was traveling with him, abandoned the trailer at the truck stop.
Doris Argueta, another survivor, testified that once they got to Victoria, water bottles were passed to them through the punched-out holes but the doors weren't opened for another 20 minutes.
When authorities discovered the trailer, most of the surviving immigrants had fled, while the others were too weak to move.
Roldan, who works as a meat packer in Iowa, and Argueta, who works at a dry cleaners in New York, said they have not been promised help with their residency status in exchange for their testimony.
Williams, 34, a Jamaican citizen who lives in Schenectady, N.Y., is the only one of 13 defendants in the case who could get the death penalty. Federal law allows capital punishment in fatal smuggling cases.
He is being tried on 58 counts of harboring and transporting illegal immigrants.
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