Posted on 10/10/2005 5:23:25 PM PDT by csvset
Harvest of death on the Eastern Shore Last updated: 1:43 PM
By BILL BURKE, The Virginian-Pilot
© October 10, 2005
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| Rogue vehicles driven by unlicensed drivers have been responsible for a string of deadly accidents on the Eastern Shore. Two people were killed and two injured when this Ford Escort driven by a Hispanic farm worker ran a stop sign Oct. 1 in Accomack County. virginia state police photos
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ACCIDENT TIMELINE:
The 13 fatal accidents involving Hispanic workers on the Eastern Shore since 2002 have killed 18 people. In all but two incidents, the car that caused the accident had out-of-state plates.
Aug. 19, 2002
U.S. 13: Intoxicated migrant worker hit and killed while walking illegally on U.S. 13 at night. Plates: South Carolina.
Aug. 29, 2002 Va. 178: Car runs off road and strikes trees and pole, killing three. Plates: Tennessee.
Nov. 4, 2002 Va. 609: Driver killed when he runs into ditch, loses control and car overturns. Plates: Tennessee.
Feb. 3, 2003
Va. 187: Head-on collision kills two when driver blacks out and crosses median. Plates: Virginia.
July 24, 2003 Va. 609: Driver killed when vehicle runs off road and overturns. Plates: Florida.
Aug. 31, 2003 U.S. 13: Car with three occupants overturns, killing one; driver flees. Plates: Virginia. Oct. 9, 2003
U.S. 13 (Business): Driver killed when he loses control of car, strikes tree then utility pole. Plates: Tennessee.
Nov. 2, 2003 U.S. 13: Driver killed when car runs off road at high speed and flips end-over-end five times. Plates: Tennessee.
Dec. 20, 2003 U.S. 13: Head-on collision involving two cars with migrant workers; driver of one dies the next day in Charlotte, N.C. Plates: North Carolina.
Dec. 24, 2003
U.S. 13: A head-on collision killed Debbie Thomas, above, a mother of three. Plates: Tennessee.
May 10, 2004 U.S. 13: Driver and passenger killed when they are thrown from one car and struck by two others. Plates: Texas.
July 22, 2004 U.S. 13: Driver killed when he loses control of vehicle and it overturns. Plates: Florida.
Oct. 1, 2005 Intersection of Va. 180 and Va. 600: Driver and child passenger killed when car runs stop sign and is broadsided by a pickup. Plates: Michigan. |
The Ford Escort was racing north on rural Seaside Road, its occupants headed home from a wedding, when it ran a stop sign at 55 mph.
The driver of a Ford F-150 traveling east through the intersection never saw the Escort, police said.
The T-bone crash killed the driver of the Escort, Rene Leyva-Perez, and 4-year-old Daniel Salazar, who was in the back seat. Daniel’s pregnant mother, Marina Salazar, and the driver of the pickup were injured.
When police arrived, they discovered that Leyva-Perez had no auto insurance or driver’s license – only a laminated ID card issued by the tomato-packing plant where he worked – and that the car was registered to a woman in Chesapeake and had Michigan plates.
In the Escort’s wreckage, they found empty cans of Modelo Especial – acclaimed in Mexico as “the elite of beers.”
That violent collision nine days ago, on an unlit stretch of Accomack County blacktop, is the latest example of a deadly trend:
Since 2002, more than 90 people have been injured and 18 killed on the Eastern Shore in accidents involving Hispanic workers driving rogue vehicles.
The fatalities represent about one-fourth of the 71 highway deaths on the Eastern Shore in that period, even though the year-round Hispanic population makes up only 5 percent of the region’s 51,000 residents. Those numbers swell during tomato-picking season, from July through early November, when most of the fatalities occurred.
Accidents like the one on Oct. 1 have helped make the 77-mile stretch of U.S. 13 from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the Maryland state line one of the most treacherous highways in Virginia. In 2003, the fatality rate – deaths per miles driven – on that span of U.S. 13 was more than four times the rates on Interstates 64, 81 and 95 in Virginia.
In all but three of the fatal accidents in which Hispanics were at the wheel, the drivers had no insurance. In most cases, the vehicles had no inspection stickers, the drivers carried no license and alcohol was a factor. The vast majority of the victims in the fatalities were Hispanic.
A review of State Police auto accident reports for 2002 through 2004 on the Eastern Shore also revealed that of the 179 accidents involving Hispanic laborers:
nThree-fourths of the drivers had no auto insurance – more than four times the national rate for uninsured motorists.
nNearly all of the vehicles driven by migrants and other laborers were registered to other drivers.
n Ninety-three percent of the vehicles had out-of-state tags – most of them from Tennessee.
nThe number of injuries per accident was about 50 percent higher than the statewide average.
The troopers patrolling U.S. 13, a busy artery connecting Hampton Roads to the populous Northeast, are frustrated by the pattern of lawlessness and mayhem.
Only 10 troopers are assigned to the highways that crisscross the Eastern Shore’s 263 square miles – and on some shifts there is only one trooper on duty for each of the Shore’s two counties. First Sgt. J.P. Koushel, who oversees the Shore’s troopers, said his unit is “tremendously understaffed” and that he has requested additional manpower.
“Right now we’re just running from call to call,” Koushel said. “We can’t even be pro active anymore.”
Koushel said most of the vehicles involved in accidents that kill and injure fail to meet Virginia highway safety standards. He called it “a mockery” of the state’s vehicle registration law.
Tennessee plates
The state of Tennessee appears to be an enabler for many of the illegal drivers.
Up and down the Eastern Shore, in the work camps and housing complexes where migrants and year-round laborers live, Tennessee plates abound. Eastern Shore law enforcers suspect there is a flourishing black market for Tennessee tags.
There has been speculation of a mail-order operation, but postmasters say they cannot discuss the nature of their mail. Officials for the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation would not say if they are looking into the Tennessee tag issue.
Tennessee’s titling and registration regulations are among the most lax in the nation. Several migrants interviewed recently said they got Tennessee tags because they were turned down by Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
Tennessee does not require identification or proof of insurance when a vehicle is titled and plates are issued, as long as the motorist pays cash. Most states require identification or proof of insurance; Virginia requires both.
Tennessee state Sen. Bill Ketron said his state’s legislature has failed to close the loophole because of pressure from the powerful auto insurance industry, which he says “wants to be able to cherry-pick who they sell to,” rather than being forced to insure high-risk drivers. He plans to introduce a bill during the next legislative session, which begins in January, that would toughen titling and registration requirements.
The problem also has come to the attention of Virginia’s Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers Advisory Board. The Tennessee license plate matter is “a political hot potato,” said Kenneth E. Annis of Exmore, chairman of the 15-member board.
Annis promised that it will be addressed at the board’s next meeting. The board, which meets four times a year, can recommend changes to the governor or the General Assembly.
Other regions with significant Hispanic populations, such as Rockingham County in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the Greensboro/Winston-Salem area of North Carolina, have not seen significant numbers of cars with Tennessee tags, say law enforcement officials there.
But on the Eastern Shore, “Somebody is making it very easy for these drivers to get Tennessee tags,” Annis said. “It’s all very fishy.”
And deadly. In the 13 fatal accidents since 2002 involving Hispanic workers, six vehicles bore Tennessee tags.
Many of the Tennessee plates on the Shore were issued in Union County, in the eastern part of the state near the Virginia border – about a nine-hour drive from the Shore.
Jim Houston, county clerk for Union County, said Tennessee officials are aware of the problem. Houston said his office sees “quite a few” Hispanics registering vehicles, “and I think the number’s increasing.”
When the topic of migrants titling vehicles came up at a recent meeting of Tennessee clerks, Houston said, “One of the other clerks said, 'Lord, we’re overrun with them.’”
Migrant population swells
Each year, tomato pickers follow the jobs north from Florida and Georgia to Virginia’s Eastern Shore by the thousands.
In July, the Hispanic population on the Shore swells from fewer than 3,000 – those who live there year-round – to about 7,000. The seasonal migrants stay until late October, sometimes into November, then head south.
In recent years, more workers have stuck around when the growing season ended. The number of Eastern Shore laborers who stayed behind and became full-time residents jumped from 177 in 1980 to 2,516 in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
With its long growing season, the Shore has become one of the nation’s garden spots for tomatoes, which are now its biggest cash crop. Virginia ranks third in the nation in tomato production, behind Florida and California. Virginia’s annual crop is valued at $60 million – 95 percent of it grown on the Shore.
Tomatoes must be picked by hand, a labor-intensive and often sweltering task. The migrants from Mexico and Central America bring a willingness and the skills that local laborers generally lack, said Jim Belote, agricultural extension agent for Accomack County.
“These guys are incredible athletes,” he said. “You’ll see one worker toss a basket of tomatoes to a guy on a truck like a football player completing a pass, and then the first guy is filling another basket.
“They’re also very conscientious. They live in what we would consider impoverished conditions so they can send most of their salary to relatives back home.”
Migrants are indispensable to the large commercial tomato growers that dominate the industry on the Shore. Jay Taylor, president of Florida-based Taylor & Fulton Inc., one of the Eastern Shore’s largest growers, said his company hires between 650 and 750 migrants to pick tomatoes and 150 more to package them during the height of the season at its Mappsville operation.
Jim Albright, who ministers to migrants on the Eastern Shore for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond, said most Hispanics on the Shore are law-abiding and hard working. Some are professionals, and there are two Hispanic doctors, he said.
Albright said migrants have been victimized by fly-by-night entrepreneurs who promise to get them immigration documents, then disappear with their cash. He said he knows it is difficult for many migrants to obtain driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations, which can lead them to seek Tennessee tags.
Most of the laborers live in Accomack County housing complexes, motels and mobile home parks, some in squalid conditions. Two of the largest trailer parks are named Dreamland 1 and Dreamland 2.
One laborer, a resident of Dreamland 1 and a Mexican immigrant, said weekend parties are a way of letting off steam after a hot week in the fields.
In 2003 and 2004, 128 of the 395 people arrested on DUI charges on the Shore – 32.4 percent – were Hispanic. Steve Hearn, who heads the Shore’s Virginia Alcohol Safety Action Program, said the courts are sending increasing numbers of Hispanics through the program, and he has begun conducting classes in Spanish on videotape and using a Spanish-speaking interpreter for alcohol-awareness sessions.
The carnage
The mix of alcohol, unsafe vehicles and inexperienced drivers has bred carnage along the back roads that connect farm fields to the hamlets on the Shore. Those roads eventually lead to U.S. 13, which bisects the long, narrow peninsula.
When crashes occur, it is not uncommon for Hispanic drivers – often intoxicated and unlicensed – to flee before troopers arrive. According to State Police records, about a third of accidents involving migrant workers are hit-and-run.
That’s what happened on Aug. 29, 2002. The driver of a 1990 Dodge van apparently lost control on Va. 178 near Belle Haven. The van veered off the road and struck several trees, then a utility pole.
There were seven people in the van, and three of them – all migrant laborers – died. Two passengers fled before police arrived. The car was registered to Guadalupe Ramirez in Unicoi County, Tenn.
Many accidents leave a curious paper trail. On Nov. 4, 2002, a 1986 Nissan Sentra overturned on Va. 609 in Accomack County, killing the driver, Jesus Antonio Lopez.
Lopez was intoxicated, according to police. The car he was driving bore Tennessee plates and was registered to Michael Jones of 620 Pinewood Drive in Virginia Beach.
Jones, contacted recently in Virginia Beach, said he owned an ’86 Sentra when he lived at that address but that he had since moved and given the car to a friend in Northampton County. Jones said the friend later sold the car.
Told that the car had been registered in his name in Tennessee, Jones speculated that someone had found papers with his personal information in the car and used them to get the Tennessee tags.
“It’s kind of scary to think that can happen,” he said.
A collision on Dec. 20, 2003, involved all of the volatile ingredients: two cars carrying laborers, each bearing out-of-state tags, crashed head-on. Investigators said both drivers had been drinking.
Victor Herrera Munoz, a poultry worker, was headed south on U.S. 13 in a 1985 Chevrolet Camaro with North Carolina plates when he lost control, crossed the median and struck an oncoming Ford Escort, according to a police report.
When officers arrived, no one was in the driver’s seat of the badly crumpled Escort, which had Tennessee plates. An ambulance transported Munoz to a hospital in Salisbury, Md.
A few days later, police discovered what happened to the driver of the Escort, Israel Gomez Sanchez. Friends of Gomez Sanchez following in another car had pulled him from the wreckage, placed him in their car and set out on an eight-hour drive to Charlotte, N.C., where Gomez Sanchez had relatives.
There, the injured man’s family called an ambulance. According to the medical examiner’s report, Gomez Sanchez died at a Charlotte hospital, nearly 14 hours after the accident.
Accomack County prosecutors initially planned to charge Munoz with manslaughter, but decided it would be difficult to convict him because Gomez Sanchez may have lived had he received prompt medical attention.
State Trooper Koushel said migrants often cannot be conclusively identified when they’re stopped for a violation or involved in an accident. Many, he said, are illegal aliens who carry fake or invalid driver’s licenses. Because of that, he said, many fail to show up in court.
“It’s almost like writing a ticket to a ghost,” Koushel said.
Sometimes when there’s an accident involving a fatality or serious injury, “we don’t even know what embassy to contact,” he said.
It’s three months into the harvest season, and State Police recently have seen the effects of the migrant influx. So has Sentara Norfolk General’s air ambulance, the Nightingale.
The helicopter regularly flies to the Eastern Shore to ferry badly injured accident survivors to the Norfolk hospital. On the evening of Sept. 17, the Nightingale made two trips to the Shore to retrieve victims from accidents on U.S. 13.
In the first crash, a man suffered a broken neck when the Hyundai he was riding in pulled out into the path of a State Police special investigator. The Hyundai’s driver, a Hispanic worker, had a blood-alcohol content more than double the legal limit for driving.
In the second accident, a migrant worker was seriously hurt while walking intoxicated along U.S. 13 just one mile from the earlier accident. The van that struck him stopped, and the driver stepped out briefly before speeding off. Witnesses identified the driver as Hispanic.
Two weeks later, the Nightingale was again summoned to the Eastern Shore, to pick up pregnant Marina Salazar, injured in the crash on Seaside Road.
On patrol
Along desolate County Road near Parksley, state Trooper Casey Lewis watched a Toyota Camry pull compliantly off the road at dusk. The car’s left tail light was burned out. The license plate would have led a casual observer to conclude that the driver was from Tennessee, but Lewis knew better.
“I’ve gotten this guy before,” she said, grabbing a long black flashlight, securing a trooper’s hat over her hair and stepping out of the patrol car.
The Camry’s driver accompanied Lewis back to her cruiser and pulled out his wallet. It contained a North Carolina ID card that said he was Jose Luis Montes, a field worker from Mexico. But he had no driver’s license.
On the floor of the passenger’s side of the Camry sat a brown paper bag containing a six-pack of beer bottles. Five were empty.
It was not Montes’ lucky night. He was only about 200 feet from the entrance to Dreamland 2, where he lives. Lewis cited him for driving without an operator’s permit, an open-container violation and driving with defective equipment.
A few minutes later, Parksley Police Chief Tommy Carpenter pulled up and removed the Tennessee plates with a power screwdriver.
“We’ll take them back and destroy them,” Lewis said. “That way they won’t get recycled on the Shore.”
Later that evening, Lewis was one of more than a half-dozen officers who set up a DUI checkpoint in front of a funeral home on Parksley Road, a two-lane stretch of rural blacktop. State Police operate checkpoints once or twice a month. This time, in order to muster enough manpower, they had to recruit local sheriff’s deputies.
From midnight to just before 4 a.m., the officers stopped cars, vans and pickups in the sulfurous haze of orange roadside flares, waving suspected violators into the funeral home parking lot. It was a busy night. At one point, eight vehicles were parked at odd angles as officers interviewed their drivers.
At 12:23 a.m., an officer flagged a Nissan pickup with Alabama tags and a black crouching tiger painted on the driver’s-side door. Two Hispanic men wearing white T-shirts got out. The driver had no license or ID.
The men became agitated as they milled around. When a tow truck arrived to haul away the pickup, one of the men began shouting “Discrimination! Discrimination!”
As the wrecker pulled away with the pickup aboard, one man flung himself on the flatbed tow truck and tried to roll under his confiscated pickup.
The ruse didn’t work.
“Come on down off there, amigo,” one of the officers ordered.
There was little rest on this night for Randy Miller, owner of Randy’s Service Center in Parksley. He drives a red tow truck with “23½ HOUR SERVICE” emblazoned on the driver’s door.
“The half-hour is when I sleep,” Miller deadpanned as he loaded up for his fifth trip of the night.
Miller said he maintains a small used-car lot made up mostly of aging vehicles that were never claimed for the $125 towing fee. They often are sold to other farm laborers, police said, thus making their way back onto the highways – many of them sporting Tennessee plates.
The fallout
Every fatality leaves people dealing with its aftermath. Georgie Smith is one of them.
When her daughter, Debbie Thomas, was killed in a Christmas Eve 2003 accident on U.S. 13, Smith was left to raise three grandchildren. Six generations now live in the same two-story house in Painter.
That Christmas, Smith recalls, people came by the house not to celebrate the holiday but to offer condolences. Her grandchildren received the gifts from their mom unwrapped, in a cardboard box.
Thomas had been on her way home that night to wrap the presents. She was less than a mile from her house in Nelsonia when her Nissan Sentra was hit head-on by a Geo Storm with Tennessee plates traveling the wrong way.
The impact tore the shoes from Thomas’ feet. She later died at the hospital. Her daughter, Marquita, suffered only minor injuries – thanks to a last-second maneuver by Thomas. State Police said she turned the wheel to the right just before impact, taking the brunt of the collision on the driver’s side and probably saving Marquita’s life.
The driver of the other car, Narciso Garcia-Jimenez, was seriously hurt. He was air-lifted unconscious to Sentara Norfolk General, where State Police told hospital officials that they planned to obtain a warrant, charging him with manslaughter.
But later, when a nurse went to Garcia-Jimenez’s room, the bed was empty – except for a dangling intravenous line. He remains a fugitive.
Garcia-Jimenez worked at one of the sprawling poultry plants in Accomack County. The Geo Storm he was driving was uninsured, had no inspection sticker and was registered to another person at P.O. Box 87, Newport, Tenn. – an address that frequently shows up on registration papers carried by migrants, State Police said.
Smith thought the driver of the car that struck her daughter’s had been killed in the crash. When told he had survived and had never been arrested, Smith said she felt “angry, bitter and sad, all at once.”
Angry, but not surprised. Not long ago, a man crashed a car near the family home on narrow, poorly lit Shell Bridge Road.
When police arrived, they found the car smashed against a tree. The driver was gone. So were the license plates.
Staff writer David Gulliver contributed to this report.
Reach Bill Burke at (757) 446-2589 or bill.burke@pilotonline.com.
Am I the first to say: "They're just killing the people Americans don't want to kill."
If they're so skilled, athletic and conscientious, why can't they get jobs back in the home country?
Starting to see the same thing in the apple orchard country in midstate PA. Just substitute US 15 for US 13 and much the same.
I'm not defending illegal immigration, not at all. But, well, 20 some years ago I helped to plant a vineyard and to care for it. The boss got some Hispanics to help with the harvest one year. They were incredible and they put the Anglos to shame with respect to both the speed and quality of their work.
Tennessee would change their ways..
nThree-fourths of the drivers had no auto insurance – more than four times the national rate for uninsured motorists.
nNearly all of the vehicles driven by migrants and other laborers were registered to other drivers.
n Ninety-three percent of the vehicles had out-of-state tags – most of them from Tennessee.
--I live in Virginia and it is being over run in some areas with 10 to 15 of them living in one house
Tennessee does not require identification or proof of insurance when a vehicle is titled and plates are issued, as long as the motorist pays cash. Most states require identification or proof of insurance; Virginia requires both.
----Then stay out of our state and stay in Tennessee. They need to follow the law.
Well, about the time it stopped being funny, it became a tradition.
Have you ever driven in Mexico? It's scarey.
I get the feeling that such work ethic is more temporary than we are led to believe, witness the mess south of our border.
No, I haven't been to Mexico. I can only imagine what it's like.
I think TN has easy to obtain driver licenses as well. I wonder if a little national media exposure would cause TN to change their ways?
Journalists have really gone to hell.
What a unique way to put it; as though the vehicle itself were responsible for part of the problem.
Much like the way the idiots describe SUV accidents.
"Rogue", huh?
Or any other form of responsibility either.
True story:
A couple of years ago a woman who used to work for me was hit be a truckload of swarthy looking types (in Norcross GA - home to the illegal immigrant). They took off. Her car was drivable so she followed and called the police from her cell phone. The police caught them in Roswell, ga. Arrested the entire lot of them on one charge or another - driver leaving the scene of an accident, the others on public drunkeness or something - I'm not sure, but plenty of open beer containers in the vehicle. Not a single one had any verifiable id and of course no insurance or driver's licenses. The all bailed out by the next day. Court date came - not a single one showed up. They issued bench warrants, but so what. They all gave false names. None of them had an fixed address. They could have moved two blocks, two miles, or back to Mexico, and they'd never find them.
This point up the flaw in "law enforcement" It's only designed to victimize the law abiding. If you have wetbacks like these there isn't any way to do anything to them unless they're arrested and kept without bail, and there are too many of them for that.
Come to Gwinnett county GA and find out - more hispanic immigrants (surely all legal) than any other county in the entire USA according the the Atlanta Fish Wrapper anyway.
My family who lives in the Easton - St. Michaels area has been involved in two wrecks with illegals, and witnessed others. Fortunately, nobody in my family was injured more than bumps and brusies. Between the illegals and the huge over population of deer, it's a certainty that you will wreck your car sooner or later.
Kudoes to VA for compiling these stats. Illegal alien traffic stats are a closely guarded secret in Texas, never published by TXDOT, but I'm sure they are comparable. These irresponsible lawbreakers don't need no steenkeen traffic laws or driver's licenses or insurance, and they are a danger to everyone on the highway, particularly at night after they've been drinking at their numerous celebrations. We should pressure the Dept. of Transportation to release all data on Hispanic drivers in all 50 states to see just what the extent of this problem is. Profiling on the highways should be a necessity when these disproportional carnage is taking place.
bttt
bttt
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