Video emerges after US border officers encourage teen to drink fatal meth dose
A Mexican family has been awarded a $1.25 million settlement after a teenage boy died after drinking liquid methamphetamine in front of US-Mexican border patrol officers.
Shocking CCTV has only now been publicly released of the 2013 incident, appearing to show US-Mexican border police encouraging the 16-year-old to drink the highly concentrated drug, hours before his heart stopped.
In footage, two border protection officers can be seen gesturing for Cruz Velazquez to drink from the bottles he was trying to bring in.
The pair examine the bottles, before officer Valerie Baird uses a hand gesture indicating for the high school boy to drink what would be his fatal swigs.
The officers exchange smiles as they watch the youth nervously swig from the highly-concentrated solution.
After Cruz takes a sip, her partner Adrian Perallon gestures to take another sip.
He pushes a second bottle toward the young man and smiles at Baird before Cruz takes two more sips.
The youth died from heart failure two hours later, ABC News in the US reported.
The two officers in the video denied making Cruz ingest the liquid, and they reportedly remain employed as border patrol police, with no disciplinary action taken against them.
“I never asked him to. He volunteered to and I believe I gestured to him to go ahead,” officer Perallon told the court.
Californian politician Zoe Lofgren, who is also the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, slammed the officers’ behaviour.
“Drug smuggling is wrong and is a crime, but this teenage boy did not deserve a death sentence,” he told ABC News.
“For CBP officers to inflict a summary death sentence is not only immoral, but also illegal.”
It was reported Cruz soon began sweating and screaming in Spanish about “the chemicals” in the bottles.
Records showed he yelled: “My heart! My heart!” before his heart stopped.
More than three years after the teenager’s death, his family was awarded a settlement in March, after settling a wrongful-death lawsuit against the US government and the two border officers.
