Family forced to dig mass graves for the three mums, six children murdered in cartel massacre
Days after nine of their family were brutally murdered in a cartel massacre, grieving relatives have been forced to dig mass graves to fit them all.
Days after a brutal cartel massacre left nine people — three mums and their six young children — dead, grieving relatives have started to bury the victims.
Dawna Ray Langford, 43, and her sons Trevor, 11, and Rogan, two, were the first three to be buried, the first of three funerals stretched across two days.
Pictures showed hundreds of mourners following the three handcrafted pine coffins to the cemetery at La Mora in the north of Mexico, where the nine victims lived in a remote Mormon community just south of the US border.
Ms Langford and two of her sons were murdered in their SUV however some of her other children managed to escape the shooting and hide in the bushes.
One of Ms Langford’s children, a 13-year-old boy named Devin, later walked 22km back to La Mora to get help.
His older sister had been shot in the foot and his younger brother was flown to hospital in Arizona after being shot in the jaw.
“After witnessing his mother and brothers being shot dead, Devin hid his six other siblings in the bushes and covered them with branches to keep them safe while he went for help,” relative Kendra Miller said.
“When he took too long to return, his nine-year-old sister left the remaining five to try again.”
Before the first funeral was held, photos showed the tragic preparation their surviving relatives were forced to take, digging mass graves in the desert to fit all the coffins at their small La Mora cemetery.
Members of the extended community — many of whom, like the victims, are dual US-Mexican citizens — had built the coffins themselves and used shovels to dig the shared grave in La Mora’s small cemetery. Farmers and teenage boys carried the coffins.
In a raw, tearful service, relatives recounted valiant efforts to try to rescue their loved ones after the ambush.
There was no talk of revenge in the deeply religious community, only justice.
“God will take care of the wicked,” Jay Ray, Dawna’s father, said in a eulogy according to AP.
David Langford called his wife a hero for telling her children to duck as their vehicle came under fire.
“I find it hard to forgive,” he said. “I usually am a very forgiving guy, but this kind of atrocity has no place in a civilised community.”
“My children were brutally, brutally murdered,” he said, “and my beloved wife.”
Of the survivors, he said, son Cody had had a plate installed in his jaw, which was being wired shut for six weeks, and the rest were “actually doing really well.”
His daughter, who was shot in the foot, was carried around at the funeral.
RELATED: Boy walks 22km to get help after witnessing family’s murder
Dawna’s younger sister Amber Ray, 34, eulogised her as a devoted mother to her 13 children and homemaker who loved a good laugh and baked the best birthday cakes around.
The three coffins, two of them child-size, were placed into vehicles, and family members rode with them to the grave, hundreds of mourners following on foot.
Later in the day, a memorial was held for Rhonita Miller and four of her children, all of whom also were murdered on the road between La Mora and Chihuahua state.
Their car was around 18km behind the other two SUVs after she was forced to change a flat tyre.
The hail of bullets Ms Miller’s car was hit by exploded the petrol tank, leaving it a charred hunk of metal by the time relatives arrived.
Inside, they found the remains of Ms Miller, 30, and her four children — Howie, 12, Krystal, 10 and eight-month-old twins Titus and Tiana.
RELATED: Pictures show the horrific aftermath of the LeBaron family massacre in northern Mexico
In a grassy backyard before hundreds of attendees, Ms Miller was eulogised as an “innocent spirit, beautiful heart” and a woman whose laugh “could light up a room.”
Son Howard Jr. loved basketball and recently was delighted to make his first three-pointer; daughter Krystal was “the apple of her daddy’s eye;” twins Titus and Tiana, born March 13, were remembered as “two perfect angels in the first precious moments of their lives.”
Their bodies were to be taken later across the road where they died for burial in Colonia Le Baron.
The two communities, whose residents are related, drew together in a show of grief.
Patrols of Mexican army troops passed by regularly on the hamlet’s only paved road.
RELATED: Mormon breakaway cult’s violent history with Mexican drug cartels
Gunmen from the Juarez drug cartel had apparently set up the ambush as part of a turf war with the Sinaloa cartel, and the three mums drove into it.
Mexican officials said the attackers may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of a rival gang.
But Julian LeBaron, whose brother Benjamin, an anti-crime activist, was killed by cartel gunmen in 2009, disputed that.
“They had to have known that it was women and children,” he said.
He said the eight children who survived reported that one mother got out of her SUV and raised her hands and was gunned down anyway.
Christina Langford Johnson was found a few metres from her van after she had tried to leave her driver’s seat and wave her arms to show she wasn’t a threat.
She had been shot to death but her seven-month-old daughter, Faith Marie Johnson, was discovered uninjured in her car seat.
Kendra Miller, a relative, wrote that the baby’s car seat “seemed to be put on the floor by her mother to try and protect her. ... She gave her life to try and save the rest”.
— With AP
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