By Joseph Green-Bishop
Texas Metro Correspondent
The mother of one of two survivors in a group of four close friends, from South Carolina kidnapped on February 3rd in a Mexican border town, warned her daughter that the intended destination in the central American country was not safe.
Barbara Burgess said she told her daughter, Latavia McGee, that the trip should be cancelled, according to statements made by Mrs. Burgess during an interview.
Ms. McGee, the only person in the group who was not shot by the kidnappers, and Eric Williams were treated in a Brownsville, TX hospital. The bodies of Mr. Shaeed Woodward, 33, and Mr. Zindel Brown, 28, remained in a Mexican morgue while authorities searched for the killers.
The four friends, from Lake City, SC, arrived Friday, at the start of the business day, in the border town of Matamoros after a 20-hour trip. One of them had chosen Matamoros as the place to undergo a cosmetic medical procedure because prices were much lower than those in the United States. The others helped to share the driving during the 1400-mile trip.
Minutes after their arrival they were caught in a fierce gun battle between two rival drug gangs, according to witnesses and Mexican law enforcement officials, during which a Mexican citizen was also killed. Matamoros is located across the border between Mexico and the United States, about two miles from Brownsville, TX.
“There was confusion,” Irving Barrios, a Mexican law enforcement official said during a news conference held in Matamoros. “It was not a targeted attack. That’s the line that we have right now as the most viable.”
A video released on the internet captured the shooting. At its conclusion armed men, reportedly members of a drug cartel, are seen dragging the four Americans from the pavement and placing them in the back of a pickup truck. The bodies of the two slain men and the survivors were found four days later in a small house near the location where they were attacked. A 24-year-old man guarding the house was arrested.
Mexican authorities are fearful that the death of the two South Carolinians and other Americans in Mexico will lead to anger. Of particular concern to them is legislation that would label members of Mexican drug cartels as terrorists. That could lead to an American military presence in their country, suggested the Mexican president, Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Mexico would not permit “foreign countries to get involved in their internal problems, President Lopez Obrador said during a press conference after the shooting. “We are sad that this incident took place. We send our condolences to the victim’s families and to the American people.”
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said that he was prepared to introduce legislation in Congress that would allow the presence of U.S. military forces in America’s neighbor on its southern border.
Joseph Green-Bishop is a long-time journalist who has published newspapers in America and Africa. Currently he is a news correspondent for Texas Metro News.
