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Orange was worried, stuck on the other side of the border at the Motel 6 with no clue what had happened. The gunmen and their hostages stayed three hours at the clinic and then left, according to Mexican investigative documents viewed by the Associated Press.

The cartel members drove them from place to place around the city in a harrowing ride, stopping shortly after the shooting at a medical clinic.Ī doctor told investigators that two men with assault rifles burst in through a back door and threatened to kill staff if they didn’t treat a wounded person with them.

The crash would be the start of some of the most terrifying days of the surviving friends’ lives. The clinic was about a four-minute drive from where their van had crashed. The doctor at the clinic later told investigators he thought it was strange his patient hadn’t shown up for the procedure, which can run up to US$3,000 ($4,890), but his office had only communicated with her electronically. The US consulate, only blocks away, issued an alert, warning its employees to avoid the area until further notice because of a deadly shooting downtown. When Mexican authorities arrived on the scene, they found Social Security cards and credit cards belonging to the group of friends inside the van, marked by a bullet hole in the driver’s side window. A Mexican woman who had been hit by a stray bullet, 33-year-old Areli Pablo Servando, was left to die on the street. One witness said no one wanted to draw the gunmen’s attention. Video on social media showed men forcing McGee into the bed of a pickup truck, then going back to drag a wounded Williams and the bodies of their two friends across the road and into the truck as onlookers in traffic sat in their cars, eerily silent. Shots rang out.īrown and Woodard were hit by bullets and appeared to have died immediately. Several men with tactical vests and assault rifles arrived in another vehicle and surrounded them, according to Mexican police reports. Just a few miles across the border, around midday, a vehicle crashed into the group’s van. Hours passed, and on the US side of the border, Orange contacted the Brownsville police, concerned something bad had happened. The Mexican state of Tamaulipas is the subject of a US State Department warning to avoid travel because of violent crime and kidnappings, but the friends may not have known - Williams’ mother said she didn’t think her son had ever been out of the US.

It’s not clear what happened next: perhaps the group got lost. “They went to drop her off and were supposed to be back within 15 minutes,” Orange said.īut the clinic had moved to a new location several blocks away. Orange stayed at the motel in Brownsville because she forgot to bring her ID to cross the border. The friends set out early on Friday to cross an international bridge that spans the two countries, thinking they were headed to see the doctor right on the other side. Once they got to the border, they rented rooms at a Motel 6 off the highway in Brownsville, a lush town with a high poverty rate on the Rio Grande where parrots squawk from palm trees. Friends Zindell Brown and Cheryl Orange rounded out the group of five, most of whom had grown up together in Lake City, South Carolina, a town of fewer than 6,000 people. McGee’s appointment was within days of her cousin Shaeed Woodard’s 34th birthday.