Kidnapped Americans may have been case of mistaken identity

The four US citizens who were violently abducted after traveling to Mexico for a cosmetic procedure may have been kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity, a source close to the investigation says.

Latavia “Tay” McGee, Shaeed Woodard, Zindell Brown and Eric James Williams, all of South Carolina, were located in the border city of Matamoros on Tuesday — with two of them found dead, another injured and the fourth unharmed, said Tamaulipas Gov. Américo Villarreal.

A former law-enforcement official with ties to the investigation told The Dallas Morning News this week that the kidnappers may have mistaken the foursome for Haitian smugglers.

The quartet disappeared five days ago, after their white minivan came under fire in Matamoros in the state of Tamaulipas.

A disturbing video of the abduction that circulated on the Internet over the weekend showed gunmen in bulletproof vests pushing a woman into the flatbed of a truck.

The unidentified suspects then grabbed two men in the party, who at that point appeared either wounded or dead, and threw them in the same flatbed.

“All of a sudden [the gunmen] were in front of us,” an anonymous witness told The Associated Press of the broad-daylight abduction.

“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 bystander, a Mexican national, was killed in the carnage.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, asked about the case at a press conference Monday, said, “I believe it will be resolved. I hope so.”

One of the kidnapped Americans was in the country to get tummy-tuck surgery, a relative of a victim has said.

While the investigation remains ongoing, Matamoros’s reputation for gun violence as cartel wars continue to rage had contributed to initial speculation that the abduction was drug-related. 

The possible mistaken-identity angle recalls when nine dual US-Mexican citizens were killed on a rural road in Sonora after a cartel allegedly mistook their group for rivals in November 2019.

Those nine victims– three mothers and six children from a nearby Mormon community– were found riddled with bullets and burned in their cars. One of the victims, Christina Langford, was reportedly shot in the chest when she ran out of her Chevy to frantically signal the attackers to stop shooting.

“They were ambushed by the Mexican cartels; shot, burned and murdered in cold blood,” relative Kendra Lee Miller lamented on Facebook at the time. “These were innocent civilians, American citizens simply trying to live peaceful lives.”