![]() “This was the only decision (we could make), and we accepted it,” said Iván. They thought the next town over, Kemmerer, was just a 30- or 40-minute walk away it’s actually closer to 15 hours. Cokeville is an old pioneer town, best known for a hostage crisis in the 1980s, and Gustavo and Iván wanted to get as far away from it as possible. The next evening after sunset, Iván made sure that the sheep were secure in their corral, then he and Gustavo started walking along the shoulder of the county road. “Our families would have no idea what happened.” (Iván and Gustavo asked to use pseudonyms, citing fear of retaliation.) ![]() If Child flew into a rage, “we were afraid he’d kill us, throw us somewhere, and no one would find us,” said Iván. Their employers, Jon and Vickie Child, took his passport, Gustavo said, and the brothers had limited cellphone access he said they also lacked access to a car, or even a map. The hours were long and conditions were brutal, but they couldn’t see how to just leave. For the past few years, they’d split their time between a ranch outside Cokeville, Wyoming - where they helped wrangle sheep for shearing and selected lambs for meat production - and the state’s remote deserts and mountains, where they grazed the sheep on the open range. Originally from Peru, the brothers had been recruited to work as sheepherders in the United States under a temporary work visa. He tried to come up with someone who could help them, then dismissed the idea. “How are we going to get out of this?” Iván remembered thinking. Their boss, they said, carried a gun at all times. They had spent the day in the ranch’s corrals, selecting the best lambs for slaughter. “If he kills us, he kills us,” he told his kid brother, Iván, one night after work in October 2019. The job was Gustavo’s idea, and the escape was his idea, too. Este artículo también está disponible en español.
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