Surface of immigration tragedy only scratched thus far

June 28, 2008 - 4:12 p.m.
Many public servants quietly do their job well.

Victoria Fire Department Capt. Donna Odem-Dollins is just one example. Her touching story is featured in today’s Advocate.

While there’s nothing quiet about the single mother’s brash personality, her story was silent for too long.

Odem-Dollins was one of the first at the scene of this country’s worst human smuggling tragedy ever.

At 2:33 a.m. May 14, 2003, Odem-Dollins hurried along Fleming Prairie Road to a tractor-trailer stuffed with dead immigrants.

In her 20-plus years as a first responder, she’d never seen so much death and pain in one place at one time.

She saw a dead 5-year-old boy, his dead father and teenagers barely older than her own – 19 in all who were dead or dying.

Dozens of other responders also witnessed the horrors that fateful morning.

Victoria Fire Chief Vance Riley arrived at the scene not long after Odem-Dollins did. He’s lucky to have blocked his worst memories, he said.

But memories of the looks on the faces of responders – the shock, the muted fear, the sadness – force Riley to tears still five years later.

Reading and learning about the tragedy will never replicate the hurt these responders carry with them.

Of course, responding to tragedies is their job. They do it on a smaller scale each day.

Every responder agrees, though, this fateful morning was different.

At least 73 illegal immigrants left Harlingen at 10 p.m. May 13, 2003. They climbed into a sealed tractor-trailer with the dream of a better life.

Four hours later, many of the 19 who would die were dead. They succumbed to the suffocating heat, the lack of oxygen and the damage it wrought on their panicky bodies.

You’ve read those two paragraphs in one form or another dozens of times, no doubt.

But what is lost in the familiarity of an over-used passage are the stories buried between those oft-read lines.

Odem-Dollins didn’t just care for the immigrants she found with pulses. She didn’t just relive the story so that it could be told here five years later.

Her life embodies the spirit of a first responder. She’s on the front lines of caring and giving, even when she’s off the clock.

Her professional and personal story, which begins on Page A1, bears remarkable parallels.

Riley, meanwhile, felt a month’s worth of tragedies rolled into one horrific morning.

Reflection on the tragedy offered him a heightened respect for his country.

Men die every day defending the United States, he said, but others die every day just to come here.

If their stories weren’t worth telling, these responders wouldn’t tell them.

If their stories weren’t worth learning from, we wouldn’t seek their meaning.

There is a fine line between exploiting those oft-read lines and exploring them.

Odem-Dollins and Riley show we’ve only scratched a much deeper surface.