Woman dies after fall from border fence (Fence pictures)
Woman dies after apparent fall from border fence
- By Paulina Pineda
Nogales International - Updated 2 hrs ago
The Nogales Police Department is investigating the death of a Mexican woman whose body was found last week near the border fence on the east side of town.
At around 3 p.m. last Thursday, a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was patrolling the area south of the Soto subdivision was waived down by a man on the Mexican side of the fence who alerted the agent to the body, police said.
NPD detectives called to the scene recovered the body of a 32-year-old woman from Juchitepec in the State of Mexico.
Police said it appeared that the woman had sustained fatal injuries after possibly falling off the fence while trying to cross into the United States.
If so, it would be the third reported fence-fall death in Nogales since 2011, when the Border Patrol replaced a 10-foot landing mat fence with a taller barrier that ranges from 18 to 30 feet in height and includes 5-foot high, south-facing metal sheets meant to deter climbers.
In February 2012, a 44-year-old man from Oaxaca, Mexico died after falling from the fence on the west side of town and suffering head and neck injuries. Two years later, in March 2014, a 41-year-old man from El Salvador died from head trauma after falling from the border fence near the end of Short Street.
In addition, Nogales Fire Department has regularly treated fence-jumpers for broken ankles, legs and hips since the new barrier was built.
“We’ve seen several falls, and we get person-hurt calls from Border Patrol or somebody else that might have seen them first,” said NPD Sgt. Robert Fierros, a department spokesman. “We’ll see broken limbs and sometimes even worse, but it’s not often that we hear that they actually died from a fall.”
Speaking of last week’s death, Fierros said the woman must have fallen earlier in the day but no one had seen her.
He said though the dirt road near the fence is graded, the surrounding terrain is uneven, with rocks and cement patches.
“It’s pretty unstable for somebody to land on. Any fall of that height would be bad, but given the fact that there’s a lot of rocks in that area makes it all that more dangerous,” he said.
The woman’s body was sent to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and the case is still under investigation.
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