Laredo Boxcar Deaths: Six People Found Dead Inside a Sealed Union Pacific Container

At about three in the afternoon on Sunday, a Union Pacific yard worker in Laredo, Texas opened a boxcar and found six people dead inside.

A 911 call from the Port Laredo Intermodal Terminal

The call came in to the Laredo Police Department at approximately 3:00 p.m. local time on Sunday, May 10, 2026. The caller was a Union Pacific employee performing what the company described as a routine rail car inspection at the Port Laredo Intermodal Terminal, a sprawling yard at 12101 Jim Young Way that sits near mile marker 13 off Interstate 35. When officers arrived, all six people inside the container were already dead. No one was transported alive from the scene.

The yard is one of the busiest freight nodes on the southern border. Laredo sits directly across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and is the largest inland port of entry in the United States by trade value. The terminal handles thousands of cargo containers a day moving north into the country. The container that drew the 911 call was a standard intermodal shipping unit of the type used for bulk cargo, not a refrigerated car. There was no ventilation system inside, no door propped open, and no way for anyone locked in it to signal the outside.

Joe Baeza, public information officer for the Laredo Police Department, was the lead on-scene spokesperson on Sunday evening. He framed what investigators could and could not say. "At this point it's a very early phase of the investigation. There's not a lot to reveal right now because we just began," Baeza told reporters at the yard. Federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Border Patrol, and the FBI joined the Laredo Police Department on scene by Sunday evening.

Ninety-seven degrees outside, well above one hundred inside

The outdoor air temperature in Laredo on the afternoon of Sunday, May 10 reached approximately 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Officials said the inside of the closed boxcar likely climbed well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. An unventilated steel container under direct South Texas sun behaves like an oven; the metal walls absorb radiant heat, the air inside has nowhere to circulate, and the interior temperature can run twenty or thirty degrees above ambient by mid-afternoon.

That detail did the work the autopsies later confirmed. The Webb County Medical Examiner's Office determined that hyperthermia, the medical term for severe heat stroke, was the cause of death for the first five victims autopsied. The medical examiner, Dr. Corinne Stern, said she expected the sixth ruling to match. "I believe that the remaining individuals probably all succumbed to heat stroke," Stern said of the pending autopsy. Her office covers a 10-county South Texas region, and Stern has spoken publicly for years about the recurring caseload of bodies recovered from trailers, brush, and rail cars across the region.

The six victims comprised five men and one woman. Early evidence from identification cards and cellphones found on them indicated they had originated in Mexico and Honduras. Fingerprints were shared with U.S. Border Patrol for confirmation, and the Mexican Consulate in Laredo began coordinating with the medical examiner on next-of-kin notifications. By Tuesday, four of the six had been identified. Three of those identifications were publicly described: a 29-year-old Mexican woman, a 27-year-old Honduran man, and a 14-year-old boy. Three victims remained unidentified.

A train split between Houston and Laredo, and a seventh body up the line

The first picture investigators had of the container's path came from the rail consist itself. The train involved had originated in Del Rio, Texas, with at least one boxcar door propped open before the consist was split. Half of the train was routed onward toward Houston and half onward toward Laredo. The Laredo Union Pacific rail yard is about 157 miles southwest of San Antonio, which sits roughly along the northbound corridor.

On Monday, May 11, a seventh body was discovered along railroad tracks in southwest Bexar County. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said the seventh death is believed to be connected to the six found in Laredo. That victim is believed to be a Mexican resident and had not yet been identified as of Tuesday. The geography is what the investigators are now working with: a train that left Del Rio, was split between two destinations, and left bodies in at least two counties more than 150 miles apart. The physical separation of the consist masked the true scale of what had happened from any one station along the way.

Union Pacific issued a brief public statement. The company said it was "saddened by this incident and is working closely with law enforcement." The company did not comment publicly on which inspection regime the yard worker had been performing, or on whether the boxcar with the propped-open door in Del Rio was the same one later opened in Laredo.

A federal smuggling investigation in its earliest hours

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is investigating the deaths as a potential human smuggling event. That framing is what brought HSI, Border Patrol, and the FBI onto the yard alongside Laredo Police. Local departments are equipped to process a municipal crime scene, but tracing a sealed container backward through multiple jurisdictions and corporate freight records is federal work.

The case will inevitably be measured against the worst mass casualty smuggling event in recent Texas memory. In June 2022, 53 migrants died of heat stroke in a sealed tractor-trailer on Quintana Road in San Antonio. Federal guilty verdicts in that case were reached in 2025. The Laredo incident is, by the count investigators have offered so far, the deadliest single boxcar incident on the Texas border since at least 2022. Whether the seventh body in Bexar County is eventually counted with the Laredo six will affect that number, but not the underlying pattern Dr. Stern's office has been documenting for years.

What is known, and what is not

What is known on the public record is narrow and concrete. The container was a standard intermodal box, not refrigerated. The 911 call came in at about 3:00 p.m. on a Sunday with an outdoor reading of 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The interior of the boxcar likely climbed well above 100. Five men and one woman were dead when first responders arrived. A 14-year-old boy was among them. A 29-year-old Mexican woman and a 27-year-old Honduran man were among the four identified by Tuesday. A seventh body, believed to be a Mexican resident, was found the next day along the tracks in southwest Bexar County.

What is not known, and what investigators have not said, is who sealed the container, where the people inside it boarded, or how long the door had been closed by the time the yard worker reached it. The Mexican Consulate is still working through next-of-kin notifications. Three of the six victims in Laredo were still unidentified by the second day. The federal investigation is, as Baeza put it, in its earliest phase.

The dead had names. Some of those names are still being matched to bodies in a medical examiner's office in Webb County. The container has been emptied. The yard, by Monday morning, was moving freight again.

Sources

• KSAT , What we know about the 6 found dead in a Laredo boxcar
• CBS News , 6 dead inside shipping container at rail yard near Texas border
• KGNS , 6 people found dead inside Union Pacific boxcar
• CNN , 6 people found dead inside a boxcar in Texas
• TPR , Multiple people found dead inside a train boxcar in Laredo