![]() ![]() ![]() When I asked what his friend's name meant, Carl had laughed and told me that Lou's parents had a quirky sense of humor and it meant "long stick". When Carl had told me his name earlier in a phone call he had also told me that most of the students couldn't pronounce it right, so they all called him Lou. He had broad shoulders huge muscular arms, and an infectious smile. He was tall, with the dark Polynesian coloring, except for his eyes which were sea green. When he let me go I looked over his shoulder and got my first look at Carl's Samoan friend, Ao' La'au. Carl came bounding up the stairs, threw open the door and swept me into a bear hug. My plan was to duck into my room and change my clothes before greeting my son and his friend. I pulled off my rubber gloves and called, "I'm in the upstairs bathroom cleaning. I was hoping to be done and changed before he and his friend arrived. I was cleaning bathrooms and I hadn't expected him to arrive for another hour, so I was dressed as I always did while I was cleaning, in cloths I should have thrown away ten years before: an old thin, worn-out too small t-shirt and a pair of old, worn-out, way too tight cotton shorts. "Mom! I'm home!" Carl yelled as he came in the door. Had I known, I might have done things differently. Travis Loller contributed to this report from Nashville, Tenn.I had no idea what was going to happen when Carl, my son, came home from college for two weeks on spring vacation with a friend. Valerie Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas. “We are all extremely sad and heartbroken to have such a tragedy in our neighborhood,” he said. Vicente González said Sunday that local officials are in communication with the federal government about the crash. Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement shared Sunday afternoon: “I hope that today serves as a wake up call, and that state officials will begin investing in a humanitarian response that might have helped the people who were impacted by this morning’s tragedy.” While the shelter offers migrants transportation during the week, they also use the city’s public transportation. “In the last two months, we’ve been getting 250 to 380 a day,” Maldonado said. In the last several weeks, an uptick in border crossings prompted the city to declare an emergency as local, state and federal resources coordinated enforcement and humanitarian response. The Ozanam shelter can hold 250, but many who arrive leave the same day. “Most of the people coming across don’t want to stay in Brownsville, but we don’t have enough buses for them to buy their ticket to leave,” Cardenas said. “So, we’re trying to make sure they’re as comfortable as they can be so they don’t have to go out and look for anywhere else.” “We don’t want them wandering around outside,” Pedro Cardenas, a city commissioner, said Sunday after the crash. The surge in the number of migrants this week has prompted Brownsville commissioners to indefinitely extend a declaration of emergency during a special meeting Thursday. Police retrieved a blood sample and sent it to a Texas Department of Public Safety lab to test for intoxicants. “Then we’ll fingerprint him and (take a) mug shot, and then we can find his true identity.” “He’s being very uncooperative at the hospital, but he will be transported to our city jail as soon as he gets released,” Sandoval said. In order for us to find out exactly what happened, we have to eliminate the other two. Sandoval said there are three possible explanations for the collision: “It could be intoxication it could be an accident or it could be intentional. There were no passengers in the car, and police didn’t immediately know the driver’s name or age, Sandoval said Sunday afternoon. The driver was taken to the hospital for injuries sustained when the car rolled over, Sandoval said. On Thursday, 4,000 of about 6,000 migrants in Border Patrol custody in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley were Venezuelan. Brownsville has seen a surge of Venezuelan migrants over the last two weeks for unclear reasons, authorities said. Most of the victims were Venezuelan men, Maldonado said. ![]()
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