9 U.S. citizens killed in drug cartel ambush in Mexico

MEXICO CITY — Drug cartel gunmen ambushed three SUVs along a dirt road, slaughtering at least six children and three women — all of them U.S. citizens living in northern Mexico — in a grisly attack that left one vehicle a burned-out, bulletriddled hulk, authorities said Tuesday.

The dead included 8-month-old twins. Eight children were found alive after escaping from the vehicles and hiding in the brush, but at least five had bullet wounds or other injuries and were taken to Phoenix for treatment.

The attackers apparently killed one woman, Christina Langford Johnson, after she jumped out of her vehicle and waved her hands to show she wasn’t a threat, according to an account published by family members and corroborated by prosecutors and a relative in a telephone interview.

Around the ambush scene, which stretched for miles, investigators found more than 200 shell casings, mostly from assault rifles.

The attack took place Monday in a remote, mountainous area in northern Mexico where the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in a turf war. The victims had set out to see relatives in Mexico; one woman was headed to the airport in Phoenix to meet her husband.

Mexican Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo said the gunmen may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of rival gangs.

“There’s apparently a war right now,” a relative of the dead who did not want his name used for fear of reprisals said wearily. “It’s been going on for too long.”

While drug-related violence has been raging for years in Mexico, cartel gunmen have become increasingly unconcerned about killing children as collateral damage. In August in Chihuahua state, gunmen fired 123 bullets at a man but also killed three girls, ages 4, 13 and 14.

The victims in Monday’s ambush lived in neighboring Sonora state, about 70 miles south of Douglas, Arizona, in the hamlet of La Mora, which was founded decades ago by an offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A number of such American farming communities are clustered around the ChihuahuaSonora border. Many members were born in Mexico and thus have dual citizenship. While some of the splinter groups were once polygamous, many no longer are.

All of the victims were apparently related to the extended LeBaron family in Chihuahua, whose members have run afoul of the drug traffickers over the years. Benjamin LeBaron, an anti-crime activist who founded neighborhood patrols against cartels, was killed in 2009.

In a tweet, President Donald Trump immediately offered to help Mexico to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.” But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador rejected that approach, saying his predecessors waged war, “and it didn’t work.”