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 Nicholas George Zakov appeared distraught as his court-appointed
attorney entered a plea of innocent on his behalf during a brief
hearing in U.S. District Court in San Diego.
Following the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Wheat said
federal investigators were still probing the incident and plan to
take the evidence, including the as-yet unfinished autopsy results,
to a grand jury for an indictment in the next week.
Wheat said that the two men found last week in the trunk of the
orange 2012 Dodge Challenger, identified as Tarcisio Casas-Blanco
and Jose Quiroz-Casas, were from the Mexican state of Guanajuato.
They had been caught in the United States illegally before and were
voluntarily returned - a process where they waived hearings that
might have led to formal deportation and instead were immediately
returned to Mexico.
According to the complaint, when Zakov arrived at the border
inspection station after waiting in a line of cars for over an hour,
he said he had nothing to declare. However, he was selected at
random for a secondary inspection, Wheat said and U.S. Customs and
Border Protection agents using a scanner on the car found
irregularities in the trunk.
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Upon opening the trunk, the customs agents found the two men
unconscious - one was breathing and the other was not, Wheat said.
Both men were later pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Zakov, who is from North Dakota but now lives in the Los Angeles
area, told federal investigators that he was supposed to be paid
$3,500 for smuggling the men into the United States, according to
the criminal complaint against him.
(Reporting by Marty Graham; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Eric Walsh)
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