2 Americans dead, 2 rescued after shootout
CIUDAD VICTORIA, MEXICO — A road trip to Mexico for cosmetic surgery ended with two Americans dead — and two others found alive in a rural area near the Gulf Coast — after a violent shootout and abduction that was captured on video, officials said Tuesday.
The surviving Americans were back on U.S. soil after being sped to the border near Brownsville, the southernmost tip of Texas, in a convoy of ambulances and SUVS escorted by Mexican military Humvees and National Guard trucks with mounted machine guns.
A relative of one of the victims said Monday that the four had traveled together from the Carolinas so one of them could get a tummy tuck surgery from a doctor in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, where Friday’s kidnapping took place.
Tamaulipas Gov. Américo Villarreal said the four were found in a wooden shack, where they were being guarded by a man who was arrested. Villarreal said the captive Americans had been moved around by their captors, and at one point were taken to a medical clinic “to create confusion and avoid efforts to rescue them.”
The two dead will be turned over to U.S. authorities following forensic work at the Matamoros morgue in the coming hours, the governor said.
Villareal said the wounded American, Eric Williams, had been shot in the left leg and the wound was not life-threatening. The survivors were taken to Valley Regional Medical Center with an FBI escort, the Brownsville Herald reported. A spokesperson for the hospital referred all inquiries to the FBI.
The U.S. citizens were found in a rural area east of Matamoros called Ejido Tecolote on the way to the Gulf coast known as “Bagdad Beach,” according to Tamaulipas state chief prosecutor Irving Barrios.
Shortly after entering Mexico Friday, the four were caught amid fighting between rival cartel groups in the city. Barrios said the hypothesis is “that it was confusion, not a direct attack.”
Video and photos taken during and immediately after the abduction show the Americans’ white minivan sitting beside another vehicle, with at least one bullet hole in the driver’s side window. A witness said the two vehicles had collided. Almost immediately, several men in tactical vests and toting assault rifles arrived in another vehicle to surround the scene.
The gunmen walked one of the Americans into the bed of a white pickup, then dragged and loaded the three others. Officials said a Mexican woman also died in the crossfire.
The shootings illustrate the terror that has prevailed for years in Matamoros, a city dominated by factions of the powerful Gulf drug cartel who often fight among themselves. Thousands of Mexicans have disappeared in Tamaulipas state alone.
Robert Williams said in a phone interview that his brother, 38-year-old Eric Williams, was among the kidnapped Americans. The brothers live in the Winston-salem area of North Carolina, he said.
He didn’t know his brother was traveling to Mexico until after the abduction hit the news. But from his brother’s Facebook posts, he thinks his brother did not consider the trip dangerous. He hadn’t heard anything about his brother’s whereabouts, he said.