Smuggled immigrants freed

INDIANAPOLIS -- Three men smuggled about 20 undocumented immigrants into the United States, then held them in a one-bedroom apartment and threatened to kill them if they tried to leave, a prosecutor said Thursday.\nSergio Felix-Martinez, 29, Jose Palacios, 33, and Rolando Marcial-Hernandez, 26, were each charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, intimidation and criminal confinement, Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said in a news release. Palacios also faces charges of attempted kidnapping and attempted criminal confinement.\nFederal immigration officials were trying to determine where the three suspects are from and whether they were in the United States legally.\n"I doubt that they are," Brizzi said.\nAccording to a probable cause affidavit, one of the smuggled immigrants told police that in April, he approached a so-called "coyote" to bring him across the Mexico border into the United States. The immigrant agreed to pay $1,500 once he reached Pennsylvania, the affidavit said.\nSmugglers initially took the man to Phoenix and later to Indianapolis in a van with about 20 other Hispanic men and women, court documents said.\nOnce in Indianapolis, the suspects held the people in the upstairs apartment and fed them only one egg a day, the affidavit said. The suspects demanded increasing amounts of money, threatened to kill the people, telling them they would be arrested and deported if they escaped, Brizzi said.\nBrizzi acknowledged that the immigrants were brought into the country illegally, but said that was a concern for immigration officials, not the prosecutor's office.\n"A victim is a victim is a victim, whether they're here illegally or not," he said.\nOne of the immigrants, \n28-year-old Manuel Flores, escaped while the suspects were out of the apartment on May 1, Brizzi said. A relative in Pennsylvania wired him money to buy a bus ticket.\nBrizzi said the three men found Flores at the bus station in Indianapolis and tried to force him to return to the apartment, but a Marion County Sheriff's deputy working as a security guard overheard them and police intervened.\nFlores is staying with relatives in Pennsylvania, and Marion County authorities have asked immigration officials not to deport him.\nAuthorities are not sure if the suspects might have been part of a larger human smuggling operation. About 20,000 people are believed to be smuggled into the United States every year, according to Justice Department estimates.\nBrizzi said it was not clear if the immigrants were to have been forced into labor or prostitution.\nInvestigators also were uncertain of the nationalities of all the immigrants, who have yet to be located. Some were believed to have been taken to Chicago or Atlanta.\nResidents of the southside Indianapolis apartment complex were startled by the allegations and said they had no idea anything had been happening so close by.\n"That's terrible. That is just horrible," said Betty Schmidt, 52, a homemaker who said she passes the apartment every day on her walks.\nValerie Davis, 26, a nurse whose rear balcony faces the apartment across the street, said she never saw or heard anything unusual.\n"You see people all day long come and go," she said with a shrug.