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Sept. 11, 2006, 11:16AM
Man gets 23 years for smuggling deaths of 19


By HARVEY RICE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

A man convicted of participating in a smuggling attempt that led to the deaths of 19 illegal immigrants was sentenced this morning to more than 23 years in a federal prison.

The attorney for Victor Sanchez Rodriguez said the sentence was unfair, noting that it is longer than the sentence handed earlier this year to the admitted leader of the May 2003 smuggling operation.

U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore sentenced Rodriguez to 280 months, noting that not only did he participate in the tragic attempt, but he also brought his wife and son into the smuggling operation.

A Houston jury convicted Rodriguez in February on 18 of 20 smuggling counts.

His wife, Emma Sapata Rodriguez, also is being sentenced today. In the same February trial, she was convicted on 15 of 20 counts.

Her half-sister, Rosa Sarrata Gonzalez, was convicted on two of three smuggling counts in that trial and also is to be sentenced today.

The three are among 14 people who were indicted in connection with the incident, in which at least 74 illegal immigrants were packed into a sealed trailer in South Texas and brought northward toward Houston.

Survivors have testified that they screamed and clawed away the insulation in the trailer's walls as the temperatures rose and the oxygen ran out.

The truck driver, Tyrone Williams, abandoned the trailer at a truck stop in Victoria. Deputies found 17 bodies in and around the trailer, and two more riders died in hospitals.

Karla Patricia Chavez Joya, who admitted overseeing the botched smuggling attempt, was sentenced in May this year to 17 years and five months in prison.

Williams, a legal Jamaican immigrant from Schenectady, N.Y., is due for his second trial next month on all 58 counts for which he originally was tried. Some of those counts carry a possible death sentence.

harvey.rice@chron.com