Progreso Bridge owner, sheriff comment on bridge incident

PROGRESO — When he first heard of armed men in fatigues pushing a man off the U.S. side of the Progreso International Bridge, the owner and president of the Progreso Bridge company was incredulous.

“But when I saw the pictures in the paper, I believed it,” Sam Sparks said.

And this past week, four more people came forward to give their accounts of the incident from both sides of the bridge.

“I’m sure that’s what happened,” Sparks said. “I don’t think tourists exaggerate.”

The men in the photographs, he said, appeared to be about 10 feet across the border on the U.S. side of the bridge.

The Progreso International Bridge is about 20 feet above the water level, Sparks said. The water in the river there is about 10 to 12 feet deep.

Although he had his doubts initially, Sparks said after reading the story in the Star’s Feb. 24 editions that he has grown curious about the incident. He could not recall anything similar happening on the span.

“We’ve never had any problems at the bridge,” he said.

Should there be any kind of criminal activity on the bridge, Sparks said he would call the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office.

He could call Progreso police, he said, but it is out of their jurisdiction. The only form of constant security Sparks has at the bridge is in the parking lot, he said.

“I have hired an outside agency who has personnel to patrol the parking lot to stop possible theft,” he said.

“We can’t arrest anybody,” he said.

Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño, like many other officials, was unaware of the incident.

“This is the first I hear about it,” he said Friday.

Treviño said he is briefed every morning by department captains.

“I know for a fact that I wasn’t made aware of it,” Treviño said.

In his 20 years in law enforcement along the border, with three as sheriff, Treviño said he has never heard anything like it.

“Not in broad daylight,” he said.

Someone must make a report for his office to look into the incident, he said.

“We cannot initiate this call,” he said. “Somebody needs to be the reporting party.”

With a reporting party, deputies can begin an investigation. But first someone needs to make a notarized statement.

“We should be looking at this,” Treviño said.

The sheriff and the bridge’s operator were the only officials who had much to say about the Feb. 13 incident.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Felix Garza said last week he had not heard anything new.

“There is no comment at this time,” Garza said Friday.

Comment also was missing from a long list of other officials and offices the Star tried to reach during the past week.

The Mexican Consulate, the offices of U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison and U.S. Reps. Rubén Hinojosa and Solomon Ortiz, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City declined to comment or were unavailable.

Attempts to reach a spokesperson for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., were unsuccessful.