Two of the four Americans who were kidnapped after driving across the border into Northeastern Mexico were rescued from a rural house on Tuesday after being bound, shot in the leg, and transferred from place to place to “create confusion,” according to local reports and official accounts.
Latavia “Tay” McGee, 33, a Myrtle Beach resident and mother of six, reportedly traveled from South Carolina to Matamoros, in Tamaulipas State, for a tummy tuck last week. She and the three others, who accompanied her to split the driving, were close friends, according to her family. They were identified by family members as Zindell Brown, Shaeed Woodard, and Eric James Williams.
However, they were ambushed in Matamoros by gunman who shot up their minivan before taking them hostage. Brown and Woodard were killed. McGee, who was not seriously injured, and Williams, who was shot in the leg, were rescued on Tuesday morning, Irving Barrios, the attorney general for Tamaulipas. They've since been driven back into Texas to be treated at a hospital.
ADVERTISEMENT
“It’s crazy. It’s shocking. It feels like a movie or something,” McGee’s cousin Hakquan Burgess told The Daily Beast on Tuesday from his home in Lake City, South Carolina. He said McGee had even visited the same area last year without encountering any trouble. “It doesn’t even feel real... I’m still in shock. Like, I believe it, but it’s still kind of hard to believe.”
All four Americans were found at a house in a rural area of Tamaulipas, Barrios said. The bodies of Woodard and Brown will remain in Mexico for examination before being returned stateside.
The scene where authorities rescued two of the kidnapped Americans and found the bodies of two more.
REUTERS/Daniel BecerrilBarrios said they had arrested a 24-year-old Mexican national, identified as José Guadalupe N, who had been guarding the house. Authorities have not said if he's part of the violent Gulf Cartel that operates in the region. Investigators are looking for other assailants, including those who moved the group around Tamaulipas to evade authorities.
“The four people were transferred to different places, including a clinic in order to create confusion and avoid rescue efforts,” Tamaulipas Gov. Américo Villarreal said Tuesday.
Photos from the rescue posted online by EnlaceMx Noticias appeared to show officers removing restraints from McGee. In a separate video taken at the scene, Williams can be seen in the back of an ambulance, receiving oxygen but seemingly alert.
Burgess, 31, is also Woodard’s cousin, he told The Daily Beast. Right now, Burgess, like everyone else in the family, is waiting for more information about what exactly happened.
“I never expected this,” he told The Daily Beast. “Until I got that video, I was like, ‘Oh lord, it’s for real now.’”
The four entered Mexico near Brownsville, Texas, last Friday, crossing into Tamaulipas in a white minivan with North Carolina plates, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Gunmen then opened fire on their car, killing a Mexican woman—identified as an innocent bystander—who was a block and a half away. A graphic video obtained by Mexican newscast Telediario and verified by Reuters appeared to showed the kidnappers then loading the four friends into the bed of a white pickup truck, in broad daylight. Two of the friends’ lifeless bodies had to be dragged onto the bed.
A woman could be seen in a video being dragged to the back of a white pickup truck.
ReutersThe friends were targeted in a case of mistaken identity, an unnamed U.S. official told CNN, saying the four may have been erroneously IDed by cartel members as Haitian drug smugglers. Barrios confirmed that suspicion on Tuesday but did not mention Haitian drug smugglers.
For his part, Burgess told The Daily Beast he heard the group had been “watched” from the time they crossed into Mexico and that they became lost while driving to their medical appointment—something another close friend told CNN on Tuesday.
“When I reached out to the doctor’s office they told me that Latavia had reached out to them to ask them for directions because she was lost,” the unnamed friend told CNN. “They sent me a screenshot of the messages and they said they sent her the address and asked her if she was using a GPS.”
Burgess described his relationship with Woodard and McGee as more like siblings, as they all grew up together. He is also friendly with Brown and Williams, he told The Daily Beast, calling them all “laid-back people” who are “good-hearted” and “stay to themselves.”
When Burgess first heard about the kidnapping, he couldn’t imagine it was actually true. The news came via a phone call from his mom, Burgess said.
“They said that the doctor had called and said she never made it to her appointment,” he recalled on Tuesday. “I was like, ‘Man, she ain’t missing.’ I wasn’t sweating it. And then I started getting text messages: ‘Hey man, you ain’t seen what happened?’ And that’s when I got the video, and that’s when I believed it.”
A distraught friend of McGee’s, Mariah Roman, said on social media that she was the last person to see McGee before she left town. (Roman declined to comment when reached Monday night by The Daily Beast.)
Zindell Brown was wary about traveling to Mexico, his sister Zalandria told the Associated Press.
“Zindell kept saying, ‘We shouldn’t go down,’” she said.
The U.S. State Department cautions Americans from visiting Tamaulipas state at all, warning, “Do not travel due to crime and kidnapping.”
“Organized crime activity–including gun battles, murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, forced disappearances, extortion, and sexual assault–is common along the northern border and in Ciudad Victoria,” the State Department website reads. “Criminal groups target public and private passenger buses, as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers and demanding ransom payments.”
The area is controlled by the Gulf cartel, a group responsible for countless drug-fueled kidnappings and murders.
“This is like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from,” Zalandria Brown told the AP. “To see a member of your family thrown in the back of a truck and dragged, it is just unbelievable.”
A Matamoros resident interviewed by the AP said she witnessed the abduction, which she said occurred after the group’s minivan was hit by another vehicle at an intersection. Shots were then fired as an SUV pulled up and discharged a band of armed men, the woman said.
“All of a sudden [the gunmen] were in front of us,” she told the news service. “I entered a state of shock, nobody honked their horn, nobody moved. Everybody must have been thinking the same thing, ‘If we move they will see us, or they might shoot us.’”
A Matamoros resident interviewed by the AP said she witnessed the abduction, which she said occurred after the group’s minivan was hit by another vehicle at an intersection. Shots were then fired as an SUV pulled up and discharged a band of armed men, the woman said.
“Those responsible are going to be found,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a press conference on Tuesday. “They are going to be punished.”
