Deadly grain railcar may have been in El Reno for months

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ A railroad grain car filled with 11 people may have sat in El Reno for four months before it continued on to Iowa, where the occupants' decomposed bodies were found earlier this

Wednesday, October 16th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ A railroad grain car filled with 11 people may have sat in El Reno for four months before it continued on to Iowa, where the occupants' decomposed bodies were found earlier this week.

The railroad car came out of Matamoros, Mexico, and entered the United States in Brownsville, Texas, on June 15, said Jerry Heinauer, district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for Nebraska and Iowa.

The car ``belonged to Union Pacific Railroad and was loaned to another railroad company in El Reno ... and came back to Union Pacific on Oct. 10,'' Heinauer told The Daily Oklahoman. ``From the information I have, this railroad car was sited in Oklahoma from June 15 to Oct. 12, at which time it proceeded to Denison, Iowa.''

El Reno is located about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City along Interstate 40.

On Monday, workers preparing to load the car with grain near Denison discovered the bodies, said Sgt. Robert Hansen, spokesman for the Iowa Public Safety Department.

``We are treating it as a crime scene, in case it turns out down the line that there was a crime,'' Hansen said. ``There are no obvious signs of trauma.''

Heinauer said the victims _ whose identities have not been released _ apparently entered the car in Mexico and could not get out. The entrance to the car could only be opened from the outside, he said.

Officials don't know how the victims died, but say it appears they may have starved to death or suffocated in the summer heat.

Before the bodies were found, the car joined a train leaving Oklahoma City and passed through Kansas City, Mo., before reaching Iowa, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said. The railroad car was moved to Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday.

The bodies were found inside a grain car, a type of railroad car used largely on a seasonal basis, he said.

``During the spring and summer, they're not used much, so you store those cars,'' Davis said.

Union Pacific may have rented a section of track from a smaller railroad company to house the car during the summer months, he said.

Julio Salinas, a supervisory agent with the U.S. Border Patrol at McAllen, Texas, said it is not unusual for immigrants to hide in railroad cars.

``Most recently, a couple of months ago, we found 26 that had been inside a hopper car a couple of hours, and some of them were dehydrated,'' Salinas said. ``There were no fatalities.''

In 1987, Border Patrol agents found 18 Mexican immigrants dead and one barely alive in a boxcar left on a railroad siding in Sierra Blanca, Texas. The survivor told authorities the man who smuggled them across the border had put them aboard a boxcar in El Paso and locked the door.