Border accident: father mourns daughter’s death in SUV

Yesenia Magali Melendrez Cardona told her father that she wanted to follow in his footsteps.

He had made the journey from Guatemala to the United States 15 years earlier in search of a new life. In February, she left her job and studies and went north.

Chiquimulilla, the city where she spent her 23 years, was devastated by the pandemic. Unemployment was rising. The population was desperate. The streets were too dangerous to walk at night.

On Tuesday, Yesenia found herself in a situation as dangerous as the one she had fled from.

A brown Ford Expedition carried an alleged smuggler and 24 people running towards what they hoped would be a safe place. Yesenia and her mother, Verlyn Cardona, were stuck in the back when he passed through a breach in the fence that separates Mexico from California.

It had the side of a semi carrying two empty trailers. He stopped and the windshield crashed at the intersection of Highway 115 and Norrish Road.

Seventeen passengers were ejected from the SUV. When Verlyn regained consciousness at the back of the crumpled vehicle, her daughter was sprawled on her legs.

Dead.

“El sueño Americano no se le cumplió,” said Yesenia’s father, Maynor Melendrez. She was unable to achieve the American dream.

Although the car’s occupants came from different cities and countries – from Guatemala to Mexico – they were united by the hope of a better life and by the false promise, fueled by rumors, that now, under a new United States administration, was the time to achieve this.

Instead, 13 of the car’s 25 occupants died. Families were destroyed. At least 10 of the dead were Mexican citizens. At least four women in the car when he crashed were Guatemalans; two of them died.

Falsehoods have spread more and more in Guatemala, claiming that with a new president and new policies the doors were open for anyone to enter the United States, said Tekandi Consul General Paniagua Guatemala in Los Angeles. In reality, he said, “the policy has not changed much.”

“Migrants come on a trip that is sold to them like an American dream,” said Paniagua. “But in reality, it is an uncertain journey.”

Yesenia’s uncle Rudy Dominguez fled Guatemala first – 16 years ago.

Before the trip, he said, he thought about the risks: the chance of being kidnapped, the possibility of being left to die in the desert. “These are decisions you make, asking yourself, ‘Do I die there? Or do I die fighting for a dream? ‘”

When the pandemic hit, Dominguez said, the economy collapsed. There were no jobs. Some people resorted to theft and drug trafficking.

Yesenia was in her fourth year at the University of San Carlos – where she was studying to be a lawyer – when she and her mother decided to leave. The young woman was being pursued and threatened, according to her uncle.

“It was an emergency decision,” said Dominguez. “There they threaten you and kill you.”

Their journey began on February 2 and took them to Baja California, Mexico, where they stayed for about a week before embarking on the Ford Expedition.

Yesenia was in one of two vehicles that would be captured by surveillance images passing through a breach in the border fence near Gordon’s Well exit at Interstate 8 early Tuesday morning.

The 1997 Expedition would normally hold seven or eight people. But it had only two seats, one for the driver and one for the front passenger. When he crashed into the empty trailer at 6:15 am, 23 other men and women were arrested in the back.

“Having 25 people in that SUV is unimaginable,” said Dominguez. “It is inhuman.”

David Kyle, a professor of sociology at UC Davis and a specialist in human smuggling, said, “It must have been hell in that SUV even before the accident.”

Eight people were still in the SUV when the first respondents arrived. Six were dead, the other two were taken to a hospital.

Verlyn suffered a severe blow to the head that caused a brain hemorrhage. She has already been discharged from the hospital.

The 46-year-old man does not remember the accident. Just waking up and seeing your daughter dead.

“She always tried to give her daughter a better life,” said Dominguez. “I never imagined that the price she would pay would be that.”

The second vehicle seen crossing the border, a Chevy Suburban, was found engulfed in flames, its 19 occupants were discovered hiding in the nearby bush and detained by Border Patrol agents.

Paniagua, the Guatemalan consul general, said he was concerned about the increased risks that migrants are taking to come to the United States, encouraged by smugglers who, he said, are misrepresenting the situation at the border.

The aim of the Guatemalan authorities, he said, “is to inform people about the reality that is happening on the border so that they can make the best decisions for their health and their lives.”

“They don’t know if they are going to get on a tractor-trailer, if they are going to hide in the false bottom of a bus, if they are going to hide in a truck with 25 people, as it happened here,” said Paniagua. “We are seeing lives lost.”

At the beginning of the pandemic – with borders closed in Central America, fear of the virus and Trump’s tough immigration policies – there seemed to be a drop in the number of migrants to the north, said Tiziano Breda, an analyst at the International Crisis Group in Guatemala.

But as the pandemic continues – and people suffer the economic consequences – it begins to push people to the United States once again.

“Unfortunately, accidents like these are possibly not the only ones,” said Breda.

Family members described Yesenia as friendly and loving. She was like an older sister to Dominguez’s daughter, who was six years younger. She loved playing football and had such an impact on the townspeople that they are organizing tributes before her body is sent back, Dominguez said.

The last time Melendrez saw and hugged his daughter, she was 6 years old. Although he was in another country, he said, the two maintained close contact.

Last year, Yesenia told him that she wanted to come to the United States. He told her how difficult it would be to enter and asked her to wait until he found a way. He didn’t know that she and her mother were coming.

Melendrez, who lives in New York, heard about the Dominguez accident.

“There are no words,” said Melendrez, who arrived in California on Wednesday night. “I couldn’t see her anymore, I couldn’t hug her.”