KEY POINTS:
HOUSTON - An immigrant smuggler who helped organise a 2005 truck trip during which 19 people died in the deadliest such incident in US history, was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a judge today.
Fredy Giovanni Garcia-Tobar, 31, a Guatemalan living in Harlingen, Texas, was sentenced to 180 months, or 15 years without parole by US District Judge Vanessa Gilmore. He was convicted by a jury in December 2004.
The case drew outrage in May 2003 when the bodies of the immigrants from Mexico and Central America were found dead of heat stroke, dehydration and suffocation in a truck trailer abandoned near Victoria, Texas.
Truck driver Tyrone Williams, 36, a Jamaican living in New York state, at the time of the crime, received a life sentence in another Houston federal court last week for causing the deaths.
Garcia-Tobar helped recruit Williams to transport the illegal immigrants from the Mexican border into Texas.
At least 75 people were loaded into Williams' refrigeration trailer which he then sealed without turning on the cooler, prosecutors said.
Williams was the only one of 14 defendants to face the death penalty. Other sentences have ranged from 14 months to 23 years.
- REUTERS
