Federal prosecutors said they will not seek the death penalty in a recent smuggling attempt that ended with a rollover near Picacho Peak and the death of a 32-year-old Mexican man.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona consulted with the Office of the Attorney General about seeking the death penalty against three men accused of smuggling 12 suspected illegal border crossers in a Nissan Titan pickup truck that rolled over on Interstate 10 on April 6, U.S. District Court records show.
Andrew Blake, 44, and Brian Lindsay, 40, both U.S. citizens, and Pedro Perez Aguilar, a 20-year-old Mexican citizen, were indicted May 16 on 12 counts of human smuggling, including one count of human smuggling for profit that resulted in a death, court records show.
Under federal statute, the defendant in a human smuggling attempt for profit that results in a death “may be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years,” according to the Criminal Resource Manual on the Department of Justice website.
Federal prosecutors filed a notice July 16 saying they did not intend to seek the death penalty against the three men. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the decision.
Blake was deemed mentally incompetent in Arizona state court in 2015 and is being evaluated for competency in the federal case, court records show.
Sara Nicole Burns, who authorities said was the registered owner of the Titan, was indicted May 16 on a charge of conspiracy to transport illegal aliens for profit. Prosecutors said that charge was not eligible for the death penalty.
The death of the Mexican man, who was not identified in court documents, occurred around 11 p.m. on April 6 after agents with the Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations saw suspected border crossers get into the Titan in a rural area near Marana. The agents followed the vehicle onto I-10 and a deputy from the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office responded to assist the agents.
A deputy and a Border Patrol agent waited in a marked sheriff’s vehicle on the side of I-10 for the Titan to drive by, the deputy wrote in an incident report obtained by the Arizona Daily Star through a public records request.
When the deputy tried to pull over the Titan, the driver veered onto the right shoulder of the road and accelerated to 100 mph. The driver appeared to try to exit the highway “then corrected hard to the left, crossing the two westbound lanes of travel before overturning in the center median,” the deputy wrote.
The deputy saw “bodies lying all around the vehicle” when he approached the wreck, he wrote. Amid the dust and smoke caused by the wreck, law enforcement officers tried to help the injured and arrest people as they fled the scene.
The deputy saw a man whose head was trapped under the step bar on the passenger side of the turned-over vehicle. The man appeared to be dead, but the deputy noticed him moving slightly. On their second try, deputies and agents managed to lift the truck and free the man.
The Mexican man was pronounced dead at the scene. Two suspected border crossers were taken by helicopter to hospitals with critical injuries. The other 11 people in the vehicle, including a juvenile from Guatemala, were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.
Notices of consideration of the federal death penalty in fatal human smuggling cases in Southern Arizona are rare, but not unprecedented, court records show. The Department of Justice declined to provide statistics on prosecutors seeking or not seeking the death penalty in human-smuggling cases in Southern Arizona.
After a review of news archives and court records, the Daily Star found a notice filed by federal prosecutors indicating they would not seek the death penalty in a 2015 fatal human-smuggling wreck near Three Points.
William Huebbe was driving a sedan that struck and killed an 80-year-old woman in a station wagon. Huebbe was sentenced in 2016 to 11 years in federal prison. Robert Butcher, Jr., a passenger in the vehicle driven by Huebbe, was sentenced to four years in prison.
