“Help me!” he screamed, his co-workers later testified. The crane then would swing the cars onto a pile, dripping gas along the way.Īs Hilario used the loader to slowly push metal scraps, a spark ignited the gasoline on the ground. A claw attached to the crane would pick up cars and smash them, gas tank first, onto the spike, spilling gasoline into a trough. Here, according to witness testimony, gasoline was drained from junked cars through a crude process employing a 30-foot crane and an 11-foot-tall structure topped with a spike known as The Puncher. On this day, Hilario was driving a loader in a paved section of the nine-acre yard known as the defueler or car-processing area. Hilario, a 19-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, earned $8 an hour at the industrial park in East Point, Georgia, working amid jagged piles of scrap metal eventually bound for the smelter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.ĭarkness had enveloped the Newell Recycling yard by the time Erik Hilario climbed into a front-end loader on a cold evening in January 2011. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter.
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