Australians, American killed to steal truck
Thieves killed two Australians and an American on a surfing trip to Mexico in order to steal their truck, particularly because they wanted the tyres, authorities said yesterday.
Baja California state prosecutors released grisly details of the slayings, but have not yet officially confirmed the identification of the bodies. They said family members of the victims are viewing the bodies to see if they can be identified by sight.
The corpses were decomposing after the thieves dumped them into a remote well about 15 metres deep, some 6km from where the foreigners were killed. If relatives can’t identify the bodies, further tests will be conducted. The well also contained a fourth cadaver that had been there much longer.
“The probability that it’s them is very high,” said chief state prosecutor María Elena Andrade Ramirez, noting the corpses still appeared to be identifiable by sight. “If they say that they are not completely certain that it is their relative, we would then have to carry out genetic testing.”
The three men were on a camping and surfing trip along a stretch of coast south of the city of Ensenada, posting idyllic photos on social media of waves and isolated beaches, before they went missing last weekend.
But Andrade Ramirez described the moments of terror that ended the trip for brothers Jake and Callum Robinson from Australia and American Jack Carter Rhoad.
She said the killers drove by and saw the foreigners’ pickup truck and tents, and wanted to steal their tyres.
“The attackers drove by in their vehicle,” said Andrade Ramírez. “They approached, with the intention of stealing their vehicle and taking the tyres and other parts to put them on the older-model pickup they were driving.
“When they (the foreigners) came up and caught them, surely, they resisted,” she said. “And these people, the assailants, took out a gun and first they killed the one who was putting up resistance against the vehicle theft, and then others came along and joined the fight to defend their property and their companion who had been attacked, and they killed them too.”
The assailants then apparently burned the foreigners’ tents.
The thieves then went to what she called “a site that is extremely hard to get to” and dumped the bodies into a well they apparently were familiar with. She said investigators were not ruling out the possibility the same suspects also dumped the first, earlier body in the well as part of previous crimes.
“They may have been looking for trucks in this area,” Andrade Ramírez said.
The thieves allegedly covered the well with boards. “It was literally almost impossible to find it,” Andrade Ramírez said, and it took two hours to winch the bodies out of the well.
The site where the bodies were discovered near the township of Santo Tomas was near the remote seaside area where the missing men’s tents and truck were found on Friday along the coast. From their last photo posts, the trip looked perfect. But even local expats are questioning whether it is safe to camp along the largely deserted coast anymore.