UK traveller shot in Mexico ‘in wrong place at wrong time’
A BRITISH traveller has been shot dead in Mexico while sitting in a car outside a supermarket, in what his parents described as a case of being “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
Ben Corser, 37, had been in a supermarket to pick up groceries in Colima and was sitting in the back of a car outside the shop when he was gunned down along with two local friends, Alfredo and Claudio.
Mr Corser, from Cornwall, died in a hail of bullets on May 24.
His parents described him as a “happy and sociable” young man who had become part of the community in Colima, on the central Pacific coast, after staying with a local family.
Mr Corser’s father, Andrew, and his mother, Lorrain Downes, from St Just, Cornwall, have arranged for his body to be returned to the UK for a funeral.
In a statement Mr Corser, a former primary school head teacher, and Mrs Downes said: “On Tuesday evening, May 24 2022 ... while they were in the car, outside the supermarket, all three young men, including Ben sitting in the back seat, were shot dead.”
There has been a reported wave of violence in the area associated with the local Colima drug cartel which is affiliated to the notorious Sinaloa syndicate, one of Mexico’s dominant drug trafficking and money laundering gangs.
Mr Corser’s parents and his brother, Tom, a chemical industry project manager, added: “It is most likely that this was a question of Ben (and Claudio and Alfredo) being tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Mr Corser is the second person from Cornwall to be shot and killed in Mexico this year. Chris Cleave, 54, a property developer who grew up in Truro, was ambushed by two men as he drove through Playa del Carmen with his teenage daughter in March.