Texas sheriff says 7th body could be tied to shipping container deaths
The body of a seventh person was located Monday nearly 150 miles north of a Union Pacific rail yard in Laredo, where six bodies were discovered on Sunday afternoon.
A man who was found dead Monday by the railroad tracks southwest of San Antonio, Texas, is believed to be connected to the six people who likely died of heat stroke inside a shipping container near the Mexico border, according to authorities.
Salazar said investigators found the seventh person after there was an alert that one of the containers had been opened at some point over the weekend near the location.
"On these trains, there is a censor on some of the containers that alerts whenever a container's opened," Salazar told reporters. "Once those bodies were found in Laredo, they came back to this location here and started patrolling up and down the railroad tracks until such time that they found him." Salazar said the container cannot be opened from the inside.
The sheriff said the train that contained the body found Monday was from Del Rio and had split up near San Antonio, with one half going to Laredo and the other to Houston, suggesting it's possible there might have been more people in the container at some point.
"At this point, we don't know if it was opened to let people that made it out successfully or they just opened it to dump the body," Salazar said.