18 Vehicles carrying about 100 Americans had to be guarded by heavily armored Mexican soldiers as they entered the United States from Mexico after a Drug-lord opened fire on Mexican-American families on Monday, killing 9.
The 9 Mexicans killed, who have dual citizenship, were riding in a convoy of SUVs when gunmen opened fire on a dirt road from La Mora leading to Colonia LeBaron. Gunmen from the Juarez drug cartel had apparently set up the ambush as part of a battle with the Sinaloa cartel, and the U.S. families unknowingly drove into the ambush, leading to their massacre..
Bryce Langford, whose mother, Dawna Ray Langford, was one of the women killed Monday, revealed he was travelling to Tucson. He said most of the families, who buried their loved ones this week, are traveling to Phoenix, and others are heading to Tucson as they can’t stand the drug cartel violence anymore.
Langford, who was raised in La Mora but now lives in North Dakota, said the community had been considering moving recently but that Monday’s tragedy was the final straw.”The assets that they’ve acquired down there are tremendous,” he said to Daily Star.
“And to have to up and leave from one day to the next and leave all that behind, there’s definitely a lot of sad people here.”
Another of Langford’s brothers hid six children in brush and walked back to La Mora to get help.“We’re very proud of him,” Langford told the newspaper.
“To be able to make those kind of decisions under those circumstances is something not a lot of people can say they can do.”
La Mora and Colonia LeBaron, two communities in northern Mexico’s Sonora state where the bereaved families lived, is usually not protected by soldiers or the police and it took Mexican soldiers about 8 hours to come to the site after the massacre happened.
