Four Americans believed to have been kidnapped by Mexican drug cartel members were scared of entering the area and one of them had even said "we shouldn't go down" before he was tragically killed, it has emerged.
The group was travelling to Matamoros, in Tamaulipas, Mexico so one of them could have a tummy tuck surgery, when they were attacked and kidnapped.
Latavia “Tay” McGee and Eric James Williams survived and returned to their families, while Shaeed Woodard and Zindell Brown were killed.
Mr Brown's sister, Zalandria Brown of Florence, South Carolina, said that the four friends, who were really close, were aware of the dangers in Mexico.
She added that her brother had expressed some misgivings.
“Zindell kept saying, ‘We shouldn’t go down,’” Ms Brown said.
“This is like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from,” she said.
As the gruesome details of the crime come to light, Latavia's mother revealed that the killings occurred in front of her daughter.
Barbara Burgess told ABC15: “She was crying. I asked her how she was doing. She doing okay.
"She was crying because her brother got killed and she watched him die. She watched two of them die. They died in front of her."
The devastated mother thanked the community for the support and expressed her relief that her daughter returned home unharmed.
“I appreciated their prayers. I thank them for praying because that’s what I had needed. Prayer, it will change things. It works out. And prayer, you believe in it and it’ll work. It did it for me.
"Because I was praying for my daughter. And I know she was coming home. I knew it. I didn’t know when and what time. But, I knew she was coming," said the mum.
Meanwhile, Mexican authorities announced that 300 personnel, including 200 soldiers of the Mexican army have been sent to Matamoros to police the area and help bring down the drug cartels.
In an announcement, the Mexican Secretary of Defence said that the troopers have arrived in the area "in order to reinforce the operations that are carried out within the strategy designed to strengthen security in the border strip of the State of Tamaulipas, with the aim of ensuring and safeguarding the well-being of citizens, contributing to projects to guarantee peace and security in the entity".
They noted that they are ordered to inhibit the activities of organized crime in the state of Tamaulipas in cooperation with public security authorities and increase the level of trust among citizens.
The rescue of the Americans sparked fury among the local communities in Tamaulipas, a border state long dominated by the warring Gulf and Northeast cartels, where the Network of Disappeared activist group estimates that 12,537 people remain missing.
Mexican authorities quickly blamed the local Gulf cartel for shooting up the Americans, but at the same time, more than 112,000 Mexicans remain missing nationwide, in many cases years or decades after they disappeared.
Although a convoy of armoured Mexican military trucks extracted the Americans, the only ones searching for most of the missing Mexicans are their desperate relatives.
“If these people had been Mexicans, they might still be disappeared,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University.
Delia Quiroa, from the nearby city of Reynosa, has been looking for her brother Roberto for nine years, ever since he was kidnapped by gunmen — probably belonging to the Gulf cartel, the same group blamed for abducting the Americans — in March 2014.
Despite carrying out their own searches and pressuring authorities to investigate, the family knows nothing about his whereabouts.
Ms Quiroa said that the families of the missing “celebrate and give thanks to God that they found these four U.S. citizens,” but said “we wish the government would search for our disappeared with the same zeal and diligence.”
“We feel complete indignation, desperation, anguish, impotence and grief,” Ms Quiroa said, because of “authorities' failure to act when Mexican families suffer the disappearance of a relative.”
