Student At San Eli Middle School Shot And Killed In Mexico
SAN ELIZARIO — A San Elizario pre-teen shot over the weekend near Juarez was laid to rest on Tuesday afternoon, according to reports from XHIJ-TV in Juarez.
The body of Priscila Ibarra, 12, was found outside a pick-up truck Sunday night in the town of Barreales, according to investigators from Chihuahua State Police.
Barreales is a tiny farming village between Caseta and Guadalupe in the Juarez Valley across the border from Fabens.
Investigators found the body of Victor Manuel Chuca Nevares, 14, and Arturo Amaya Rodriguez, no age given, inside the truck.
They found the body of Javier Morales Beltran, 36, a few blocks away.
Investigators say they found 70 shell casings from one or more AK-47 assault rifles at the scene.
Ibarra is the only known US resident killed in Sunday’s shooting.
The deaths are just the latest in a long line of bloody attacks in rural areas southeast of Juarez along the Rio Grande. The U.S. State Department has mentioned the area specifically in travel alerts.
Still, nearly a half-dozen U.S. pre-teens crossed the border into to dangerous Juarez Valley during a half-hour span on Tuesday.
Lizette Mendoza, 12, of Tornillo, was one of them.”We’re just moving over here to Tornillo,” she said. “Because there’s a lot of violence over there in Caseta.”
She recounted one of the cartel-related tactics that prompted her family to move across the border.
“They left two heads (several weeks ago near the family’s home) and the blood’s still there,” she said.
Experts have long said the increasingly bloody tactics used by warring cartels in a bloody war for drug-trafficking supremacy and designed to intimidate and instill fear.They’re working, if you ask Mendoza.
“They could come and they could shoot me,” she said casting an eye to Caseta, just a 5-minute walk over a one-lane bridge. “Just like any other person.”
Sunday’s attack hit close to home at Mendoza Grocery and Gift Shop in Socorro Road. (The shop has no known-relation to Lizette Mendoza.)
Employees there said they buy bread from Ibarra’s uncle for use in their restaurant.A collection jar sits nearly full near the cash register; its contents are set to go to Ibarra’s family to help pay funeral expenses.
Ibarra just finished sixth grade at Garcia-Enriquez Middle School in San Elizario.In an e-mail Cristina Sanchez-Chavira, a former teacher of Ibarra, said she spoke to Ibarra just a few weeks ago.
“(S)he was excited about finishing school and looked forward to a great summer,” Sanchez-Chavira wrote. “The world is short a bright star that would have made a difference.”
