Most of the workers in the van were sleeping because of the early morning hour, but Edilberto Morales-Luis was feeling nervous. Their driver—who was trying to cover the three-hour commute to the forest quickly to compensate for lost time due to rain—was barreling down a dirt road amid gusty winds. “Why don't you drive a little bit slower?” Morales-Luis called out, only to have a co-worker tease him for being afraid. It was September 12, 2002, and the crew of fourteen Guatemalan and Honduran H-2 visa guest workers had been hired to thin trees and clear brush for six months in Aroostook County, a remote part of northern Maine bordering Canada. They were working for Evergreen Forestry Services, an Idaho-based reforestation company subcontracting for the Maine-based Seven Islands Land Company.1 As the driver, Juan Turcios-Matamoros, transferred from the dirt road onto Johns Bridge, a narrow 260-foot wooden bridge with no guardrail perched over the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, the right side of the van missed the bridge planks and caught on an outer row of steel bolts. The tires started shredding. Startled, several passengers implored him to slow down; they were less than five miles from their destination. Instead of braking, Turcios-Matamoros maintained his speed and tried to steer the right wheels back onto the planks but overcorrected. The van took a sickening skid before flipping over and plunging off the bridge into the whirling water beneath. Shocked but aware he needed to act quickly, Morales-Luis swam to the back of the van, kicked out the rear window, and pushed his way out. “I fought to get [the rest of] them out of there. But I couldn't,” he later said. The van filled rapidly with water, and the fourteen other men—who included his own uncle—sank to the river bottom. Edilberto swam to shore to get help, but the accident had happened so far from any trafficked roadway that he had to wait half an hour to flag down a passing vehicle. It then took almost four hours for rescue crews to arrive. The state police and national guard deployed helicopters and floatplanes, and rescuers were able to eventually heave the van—which still held the bodies—out of the water and onto a large flatbed truck. Juan Perez-Febles, an employee of the Maine Department of Labor's Migrant and Immigrant Services Division, joined a caravan of vehicles that escorted the truck to the Maine Medical Examiner's Office. There, he saw the victims' bodies jumbled together with saws, blades, gasoline cans, and lunch pails. “The tangled mess of flesh, vomit coming out of their mouths…. You could see the panic in their faces,” he said. Perez-Febles stayed at the office to interpret for the lone and stressed survivor, Morales-Luis, who identified his co-workers and reconstructed the accident for officials and the media.2