U.S. Border Patrol agents forced a teenage immigrant to drink a lethal amount of liquid meth, according to court records.
In November of 2013, Cruz Velasquez Acevedo — a 16-year-old boy — was forced to ingest liquid methamphetamine at the U.S. border checkpoint in San Diego, California after telling agents that two bottles he was carrying on his person contained apple juice. The agents told him to take a sip from one of the bottles to prove he wasn’t lying.
After taking four sips, Acevedo began sweating and screaming, “Mi corazón! Mi corazón!” (My heart! My heart!), with his pulse rate reportedly going as high as 220 beats per minute. The normal heart rate for children aged 10 and up and adults is 60 to 100 beats per minute, according to the American Heart Association. Two hours later, Acevedo was dead.
The court records obtained by the Washington Post detailing Acevedo’s painful death were part of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the boy’s family, who recently received $1 million from the federal government as part of the settlement agreement. Eugene Iredale, who is representing the Acevedo family, told the Post that while Cruz may have committed a crime, it didn’t warrant the death penalty, and certain not by forcibly ingesting liquid methamphetamine.
“[H]e’s a 16-year-old boy with all the immaturity and bad judgment that might be characteristic of any 16-year-old kid,” Iredale told the Post. “He was basically a good boy, he had no record, but he did something stupid. In any event, the worst that would’ve happened to him is that he would’ve been arrested and put in a juvenile facility for some period of time.”
Iredale also noted that it’s common for smugglers to pay children to bring drugs across international borders. In 2014, Al Jazeera America reported that in a five-year period between 2008 and 2013, Customs and Border Protection caught nearly 1,000 minors smuggling drugs in from Mexico, just in the San Diego sector.
Tom Cahill is a writer for the Resistance Report based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook.
