HOUSTON -- Grammy-winning Tejano singer Emilio Navaira's survival was in doubt Monday after the tour bus that police said he was not licensed to drive crashed on a freeway, leaving him with serious head injuries.

"There is a chance he may not make it," said Dr. Alex Valadka, director of neurotrauma services at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center and vice chair of neurosciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

"Everyone needs to understand that right up front. That's how bad it is."

Navaira, 45, known to his fans simply as Emilio, was removed from the bus that wrecked before dawn Sunday and had emergency surgery to remove a blood clot that put pressure on his brain. After the two-hour operation, he became part of a research study where doctors lower his body temperature, using hypothermia to treat the injury.

"As I told his family, we're not even going day by day, we're going hour by hour at this point," Valadka said.

He said laboratory and clinical studies have shown lowering the temperature seems to help prevent brain swelling and minimize harmful biochemical reactions that occur when the brain is severely hurt.

"Brain swelling is the biggest thing we're worried about at this point," the nuerosurgeon said. "I think it is a good sign [that] so far the pressures in his brain have not risen and have been controlled. The longer we can keep doing that the better it is for him."

Valadka said the death rate from such an injury is 30 to 35 percent.

Doctors hoped to begin raising his temperature Tuesday, done gradually over as much as 16 hours so as not to shock his system.

The singer was among six people -- all but one of them band members -- who were aboard the bus and hurt in the crash on Interstate 610 in Bellaire, an enclave in Houston.

Navaira was behind the wheel, as he often was, after he and the band had played Saturday night at a Houston club, said Joe Casias, who said he's known Navaira since 1980 and has served as the singer's agent since 1989 when Emilio and brother Raul formed the band.

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