Small bags inside a van whose driver was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent contained salt, not drugs, said a lawyer for a witness, contradicting federal agents.
Investigators with the F.B.I. got a warrant to search the van on Tuesday after telling a federal judge they believed that a “crystal-like” substance in the plastic bags might be methamphetamine.
On Thursday, Ruby Powers, a lawyer for Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the victim’s younger brother and a passenger in the van, said in a statement that “after consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this was granulated salt.”
Like other construction workers, her client and his brother would mix the salt into water and add lemon as a kind of homemade energy drink during their days working in the hot Houston sun, Ms. Powers said in an interview.
“He puts it in a water bottle and makes his own Gatorade, an electrolyte mix,” she added.
The Harris County district attorney, Sean Teare, also cast doubt on the presence of drugs Thursday. “Based on what we’ve learned about the passengers, it’s inconsistent that drugs were in the van,” Mr. Teare said in a statement.
Still, the question of the bags’ contents has not been definitively settled. A spokesman for the Houston field office of the F.B.I. declined to comment on the lawyer’s statement and said the agency had no plans to release results of any tests of the substance.
The spokesman directed inquiries to federal prosecutors. A spokeswoman for the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas declined to comment.
The back-and-forth came after the unusual revelation of the F.B.I. search warrant application on Wednesday. Usually such applications are filed under seal, but in this case, the application was filed publicly.
Pictures of the small bags were included in the warrant application, along with a description of their contents as a “white crystal-like substance.”
Mixing salt into water as a means of staying hydrated is common among outdoor workers, advocates said.
“We have heard from workers that a lot of construction workers aren’t buying brand-name Gatorades, etc., but making and bringing their own hydrating drinks — lemonade with salt, coconut water, yogurt drinks,” Laura Perez-Boston, organizing director with the Workers Defense Project Fund, said in an email. “Many drinks and foods hydrate the body.”
The drug debate obscured, for the moment, the circumstances that led to the fatal shooting of the van’s driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Mr. Salgado Araujo, who is from Mexico and had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, was heading to a construction job with his brother and two other workers on the morning of July 7 when agents began pursuing them while searching for a person who was not in the van. Federal officials have said Mr. Salgado Araujo attempted to evade arrest and rammed an ICE vehicle.
Little about the federal investigation into the shooting has been shared publicly, or with local law enforcement officials, who said they have struggled to conduct an independent inquiry without access to evidence being collected by federal investigators.
Local officials have expressed concern that the three surviving passengers in the van, who were witnesses to the shooting but do not have legal status in the United States, could be deported. All are in federal detention.
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