WILCOX, Ariz. — The crushed bodies of five men were discovered early Wednesday morning in a coal-filled railroad car delivered to the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative Inc.’s Apache Generating Station in the town of Cochise, according to the Arizona Daily Star.
The men were discovered about 2:15 a.m. by utility company employees as the coal was being unloaded at the power plant.
Three of the men carried identification indicating they were Mexican citizens from Chihuahua, but the identities of the other two had not been released by authorities late Wednesday.
The Mexican consul in Douglas said the dead include Gerardo Ruben Jimenez Martinez, 29, and his brother, Gerardo Ramon Jimenez Martinez, 27; and Carmelo Monarrez Ramirez, 38, all of Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua.
The three were identified through Mexican voter cards, with photo identification, found with them. The other two carried no identification, said Consul Miguel Escobar Valdez.
“We are trying to contact the families of the three individuals who have been identified, and we’re hopeful they are neighbors and friends and someone there might be able to identify them,” he said.
He said it is not clear how or when the five climbed aboard the coal car that was loaded at Lee Ranch in northwest New Mexico. It made a crew change at Deming, N.M., before heading to Willcox and the power plant at Cochise, about 15 miles west of Willcox and 70 miles east of Tucson.
Carol Capas, a spokeswoman for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, said investigators believe the five either climbed into the coal car before it was loaded or climbed into the loaded car and were sucked into the rock as it shifted with the movement of the train.
The Cochise County Medical Examiner’s Office in Sierra Vista said Wednesday that preliminary autopsy results would not be available until today at the earliest, and that the cause of death had not been determined Wednesday.
The coal that fires the electric power turbine at Cochise is delivered directly to the plant by rail.
As the rail cars arrive, they are visually inspected by an employee in a tower to ensure that no one is on top of them before they unload from a bottom dump chute. At night, the area is lighted.
“Last night as the coal car was coming in, that protocol was followed,” said Steffannie Koeneman, a spokeswoman for Arizona Electric Power Cooperative. “As the coal was being dumped, an employee noticed something white in the middle of the coal that was coming out of one of the cars. He stopped the process and went to see what this unusual thing was, and then discovered the bodies.”
She said the gruesome discovery caused a suspension of coal delivery to the plant while Cochise County deputies investigated, but that suspension did affect electricity production.
She said the power company is cooperating fully with the Sheriff’s Department investigation.
“Obviously this is an unfortunate and tragic event, and we will do everything we can do to resolve the situation.”
Mike Furtney, a regional spokesman for the company, said the open-topped cars hold up to 100 tons of coal. He said the problem of illegal entrants and others hitching rides on trains “is certainly widespread and is not limited to just the border areas.”
“We have trespassers of all kinds attempting and succeeding in using freight trains as low-cost transportation all over our system,” he said.
There were 21,719 illegal immigrants removed from Union Pacific trains last year by company employees and U.S. Border Patrol agents, said John Bromley, the company’s director of public affairs. That number has declined from a peak in 1998 of 48,558.
The company’s rail lines cover 23 states with 35,000 miles of mainline track that carry several thousand trains each day.
“We’ve had accidents before, typically when they’re hopping trains and they fall off and are injured or killed, but nothing like this,” Bromley said. “I don’t know that we’ve ever had anyone buried in a coal car.”