Ten of the victims were teenagers. All were from Vietnam. The police in England were working to repatriate the bodies.
LONDON — For weeks, the Vietnamese relatives of a 26-year-old woman who had left home in search of a better life in Europe had feared that she was among the 39 people whose bodies were found in a refrigerated trailer in southeastern England last month.
The woman, Pham Thi Tra My, who hailed from a village in Ha Tinh, had been convinced that she could find a job as a manicurist in England and help her family, which had accumulated $19,000 in debt.
But late one day in October, she had texted her mother, “I’m dying because I can’t breathe,” and apologized because her “path abroad didn’t succeed.”
On Friday, the police in Essex, England, said publicly that their daughter had been positively identified among the bodies found on Oct. 23 in the refrigerated trailer that was transported from Zeebrugge, Belgium, to an industrial park in Grays, Essex.