Mexico police make arrests following Mormon massacrer
Mexican officials have confirmed an “unspecified number” of arrests in connection to last week’s cartel massacre that left nine Mormon women and children dead.
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Mexico’s top security official says arrests have been made in last week’s killings of nine US women and children by suspected cartel gunmen in northern Mexico.
Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo is not saying how many people have been arrested or giving any information on what organisation they belong to.
“There have been arrests, but it’s not up to us to give information,” he said.
His department did not respond to requests for further information.
The ambush attack occurred November 4 in the Mexican state of Sonora.
Authorities suspect Mexican drug cartel hit men carried out the attack.
The victims were dual US-Mexican citizens, members of Mormon communities in northern Mexico not affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
HERO TEEN SPEAKS OUT
The hero teenage boy who walked 25 kilometres to get help for his siblings who were ambushed by Mexican drug cartel gunmen last week has told how his mother desperately tried to protect him and his siblings before she was fatally shot.
Devin Langford was in the car with his family in the Mexican border state of Sonora on November 4 when men who appeared to be wearing bulletproof vests started shooting at them with long guns, the teen told ABC News in the US, his first interview since the attack.
The brave teenager recalled how his mother screamed for the family to “get down” just moments before she was killed.
“Get down right now!” were the last words Dawna Langford said to her eight children, two of which ended up dying, 13-year-old Devin told the US network in his first interview since the attack.
“She was trying to pray to the lord, and she was trying to start the car up to get out of there.”
Devin’s younger brothers, Trevor, 11, and Rogan, 2, were among the nine women and children killed in the gruesome attack.
Six other children inside the family’s white four-wheel drive survived.
“They just started hitting [the] car first, like with a bunch, a bunch of bullets. Just start shooting rapidly at us,” Devin recalled. “The car didn’t work. So she was just trying right there, starting the car as much as she could, but I’m pretty sure they shot something so the car wouldn’t even start.”
“Afterwards, they got us out of the car, and they just got us on the floor and then they drove off,” he added.
Authorities believe the cartel mistook the victims for a rival gang.
Devin, who was unharmed in the attack, walked about 25kms seeking help after hiding his injured siblings in the bushes and covering them with branches. He said he feared for his life the entire time.
As he made the trek for help, he said he wondered “if there was anybody else out there trying to shoot me or following me” and he thought about “my [mother] and my two brothers that died.”
The children spent 10 harrowing hours hiding in a bush on a remote mountain until help arrived.
Devin’s dad, David Langford, hailed his brave boy as a hero.
“He’s really a hero, he definitely saved his little brothers and sisters. I think he did it because of his love for them,” David Langford told ABC News.
“My boy’s a hero simply because he gave his life for his brothers and sisters.
“Every one of my children that survived that are living miracles.
“How many bullet holes were fired into that vehicle … at that horrific scene and how many children were involved. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It’s beyond amazing that they survived.”
The family buried Dawna Langford and her two sons in La Mora last week.
“So now, it’s my whole life has turned upside down,” he said. “Not only have I lost a wife and two children, but I’m having to move the rest of my family with really no place to go at this point.”
The family members were US citizens but lived in a Mormon community called La Mora in the Mexican border state of Sonora.
The Langfords joined dozens of others from the area’s Mormon settlements to flee Mexico for the US following the attack.
“It’s not worth living in fear,” David Langford said. “The toughest part for me was saying goodbye … saying goodbye to two innocent lives that were cut short and a vibrant wife that lived a life to its fullest that had many friends and was loved by all by everybody.”
FUNERALS HELD FOR MASSACRE VICTIMS
Funerals were held last week for the family massacred in the shootout.
Relatives carried pine coffins with the remains of a mother and her two children.
Dawna Langford, 43, and her sons Trevor, 11, and Rogan, three, were buried at the La Mora cemetery.
Christina Langford Johnson was laid to rest over the weekend.
Dozens of high-riding pick-ups and SUVs, many with US license plates from as far away as North Dakota, bumped across dirt and rock roads over desert, arid grasslands and pine-covered mountains.
Many of the residents are dual US and Mexican citizens who consider themselves Mormon but are not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
At least 1000 visitors were attended the funerals.
At least one cow was slaughtered to help feed the masses, as well as the few dozen Mexican soldiers guarding the entrance to La Mora.
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PICTURES SHOW FAMILIES’ GRIEF
Meanwhile, heart-wrenching pictures have emerged of the moment members of the murdered family visited the scene of the crime.
They were seen sobbing and holding each other as they grasped the now burnt-out vehicles their relatives had been travelling in, which burst into flames as bullets rained down on them.
The emotional moment comes as Mexican authorities scramble to find who killed the nine members of the extended LeBaron family.
Police earlier arrested a man who was holding two bound and tied hostages in a vehicle saying his link to the brutal crime was “being analysed”.
They have since ruled out a connection.
The cartel gunmen ambushed three SUVs along a dirt road as they made their way to the Mexican border state of Sonora.
According to a family member the victims had set out to visit relatives in Mexico; one woman was headed to the airport in Phoenix to meet her husband.
The victims were named by relatives as Dawna Langford, 43; Christina Marie Langford Johnson, 29; and Rhonita Miller, also known as Rhonita Maria LeBaron, 30.
The six children were Howard Miller, 12; Trevor Langford, 11; Krystal Miller, 10; Rogan Langford, two; and eight-month-old twins, Titus and Tiana Miller.
AMBUSH SHOWS MEXICO’S LOSS OF CONTROL
When drug cartel gunmen opened fire on the family, the Mexican Army, the National Guard and Sonora state police were not there to protect them.
It took them about eight hours just to arrive.
To villagers and others, the bloodshed seemed to demonstrate once more that the government has lost control over vast areas of the country to the drug traffickers.
“The country is suffering very much from violence,” said William Stubbs, a pecan and alfalfa farmer who serves on a community security committee in the American-dominated hamlet of Colonia LeBaron.
“You see it all over. And it ain’t getting better. It’s getting worse.”
The lack of law enforcement in rural areas like the northern states of Chihuahua and Sonora once led the dual US-Mexican residents of places like Colonia LeBaron to form their own civilian defence patrols.
Stubbs said that after the 2009 killing of anti-crime activist Benjamin LeBaron, residents positioned themselves each night for two years with high-powered binoculars to keep watch from the large “L” for “LeBaron” that stands on a hillside above the town.
Since then, he said, the cartels have left LeBaron and the town of Galeana a few kilometres to the north alone.
But he said they have watched the cartels get stronger in the past two decades, with nearby communities in the mountains suffering from violence and extortion.
This week, he said, the military told him that the town of Zaragoza had been about 50 per cent abandoned.
Army chief of staff Gen. Homero Mendoza said that the ambush started at 9.40am (local time), but the nearest army units were in the border city of Agua Prieta, about 160km and three hours away.
Soldiers didn’t start out for the scene until 2.30pm and didn’t arrive until 6.15pm – even while five surviving children lay hiding in the mountains with bullet wounds.
“There are areas where the government’s control is very fragile,” said Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope.
FAMILY USED AS ‘BAIT’
Lafe Langford Jr, a relative of nine US citizens killed during the ambush, told Fox and Friends that he believed the family was used as bait in the cartel wars in Mexico.
“We have a lot of evidence and reason to believe that they had a strategic plan and we were attacked, unfortunately. The vehicles that had left our community were … we believe they may have been used as bait to try to attract the cartel in Sonora to them. To bring the war to them.”
America is reeling at the slaying of the US-Mexican citizens, the latest in an escalating wave of violence from drug gangs in Mexico emboldened by the new president’s “hugs not bullets” strategy.
US President Donald Trump slammed the killers as “monsters” and immediately offered American support to catch those responsible.
Dawna Langford had broken down in her SUV when gunmen opened fire, torching the vehicle and causing the petrol tank to explode.
Six children were wounded in the attack and five of them were flown to hospitals in Phoenix, Arizona for treatment.
Three other children were uninjured and remained with family in Mexico.
Relatives shared photos of the blood-soaked children being comforted in a Mexican hospital before being transferred.
Authorities also released images of the children being flown with the assistance of the Mexican Air Force.
A seven-month-old baby only survived because her mother, Christina Langford Johnson, pushed her baby capsule to the floor of the family car as bullets tore through it.
“She gave her life to try and save the rest,” said a relative, Kendra Miller, of Ms Johnson, who was apparently killed after she jumped out of her vehicle and waved her hands to show she wasn’t a threat.
Para informarles que en estos momentos, están siendo trasladados los pacientes con personal médico de Salud Sonora @ssaludsonora en una unidad de la Fuerza Aérea Mexicana. pic.twitter.com/Cosl8plwCV
— Enrique Clausen (@Enrique_Clausen) November 5, 2019
Relatives said the infant was rescued after spending hours inside the car with her mum’s body.
Male members of the family discovered the burnt out remains of the three women and their children inside the torched cars.
Around the running ambush scene, which stretched for several kilometres, investigators found more than 200 spent shell casings, mostly from assault rifles.
Mexican Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo said the attackers may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of rival gangs.
The attack took place in a remote, mountainous area where the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in a turf war with another gang.
“There’s apparently a war right now,” a relative who did not want his name used for fear of reprisals said wearily.
“It’s been going on for too long.”
In a tweet, Mr Trump immediately offered to help Mexico “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.”
But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador rejected that approach, saying his predecessors waged war, “and it didn’t work.”
“A wonderful family and friends from Utah got caught between two vicious drug cartels, who were shooting at each other, with the result being many great American people killed, including young children, and some missing,” Mr Trump added.
He tweeted that the US “stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively,” adding: “The great new President of Mexico has made this a big issue, but the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”
But Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said: “The worst thing you can have is war.”
It was the second failure in recent weeks for López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” anti-crime strategy.
Recently, Mexican forces seized a son of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman but had to release him after cartel henchmen launched a furious counter-attack in Culiacan, Sinaloa.
Mexico is on course for a record number of murders this year.
– with staff writers and AP
Originally published as Mexico police make arrests following Mormon massacrer