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Katygunnut wrote:

Kythas wrote:

hangfour wrote:I don't know but this whole incident seems a bit 'fishy' to me. Given that my primary strategy for dealing with assault is to escape, I can't imagine that one could not evade 'pirates' on a jet ski. I wonder what the real story might be.

Apparently, they were fired upon while taking pictures of an underwater church. The husband was immediately hit in the head and the pirates missed the wife. The wife then gunned her jetski back to the U.S. side (yes, they were on the Mexican side of the lake when this happened). There are eyewitness third party accounts of the wife being pursued back to the U.S. side by a boat, but the boat broke off contact when she reached the shore.

So, if they were stationary with their attention on taking pictures of the underwater church, and were fired upon while doing so before realizing there was any danger to escape from, it sounds plausible to me.

Why in the heck would someone cross into Mexico by water, without using any type of check-point. Surely if they were close enough to the shore, they realized they were in Mexican waters, unless they thought the south shore was part of Texas (being that they were in the Rio Grande, this assumes a pretty fundamental lack of knowledge of geography).

Better question is why they were not on active / high alert while in Mexican waters. I'm at a loss as to why anyone would go remotely close to that side of the lake.

I honestly think it was nothing more than a failure to take the current border situation seriously. A lot of people go through life never imagining that bad juju can happen to them. This couple's tragic jaunt to the Mexican side of the lake to take pictures of a partially submerged church reeks of exactly that. Under any other circumstances, the submerged church would be an interesting photographic subject. I'm willing to believe that these folks simply didn't take seriously the fact that an international boundary bisects the lake. I'll bet they figured (wrongly) that as long as they stayed on the water and did not try to step on Mexican soil, they weren't breaking any laws. I'll bet they figured that the ongoing drug war on the border doesn't really affect such a remote location - which is of course stupid. I'll bet they didn't watch the news much before going on their trip.

A LOT of people are simply oblivious to the world around them, and consequently, they behave stupidly. Just because they did something stupid, doesn't mean that their motivations for doing it were suspicious. It just means that they did a stupid thing, and their stupidity reared up to bite them on the backside.

Many years ago, friends of mine and I would periodically take a 2 day motorcycle ride, about once a year or so, that would take us from Pasadena down to through San Diego, where we would pick up Campo Rd (Hwy 98), which comes within a couple of hundred yards or so of the border just about 5 miles east of Tecate, Mexico. Part of our ritual is that we would ride our bikes down the short dirt road from the highway to the border fence - which was literally nothing but a double strand barbed-wire fence like you'd see on any ranch. Just on the other side of the fence, about 25 yards into Mexico, was the ruins of an old adobe house. We'd cross the fence into Mexico and make sure the sides of that that old ruin were well "watered," if you know what I mean. Then relieved, we would cross back in the U.S., get on our bikes, and ride on. That place where we stopped and parked also had the distinction of being the southern-most point on the Pacific Crest Trail, which can be hiked all the way up to Canada. There was a post with a box on top of it, inside of which was a sign in log for hikers who were going to start hiking the trail from that point.

The point of all that is that this place was out in the middle of nowhere, and we had no serious expectation of running into any authorities or criminals, either Mexican or American. The last of those trips I made was in 1984. If I were to go back there today, I'd be darn worried about what I might run into - but not everybody is that aware of the potential implications of what they do. I think that is what happened to this guy and his wife. They just weren't using their noodles.

Another follow-up story....

"Cops vow killing won't stop search for missing American"
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/10/13/tex ... l?hpt=Sbin

Gonzalez said the killing was intended as "a message to Mexico to back off, for the search to stop." But while searchers returned to the 60-mile-long lake Wednesday, the sheriff said the prospects for finding Hartley's body are fading.

The latest theory....

"Sheriff: Jet Ski killing blamed on mistaken identity"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39669630/ns ... -americas/

"The truck Hartley and his wife used to put their Jet Skis in the water at the lake had Tamaulipas state plates, and the Hartleys drove the Jet Skis to the Old Guerrero area of the lake, a known battleground in the ongoing war the Los Zetas and Gulf cartels," according to STRATFOR, a Texas-based think tank on intelligence and international issues.

"Given the couple’s license plate and method and direction of travel, it is possible that Zetas scouts identified them as a Gulf cartel surveillance team," STRATFOR said in its report.

CRAZY stuff!

Why did they have Mexican plates on their truck? Maybe they do work for another cartel.

Cobra Medic wrote:Why did they have Mexican plates on their truck? Maybe they do work for another cartel.

One story said they ALSO owned a home in Mexico, that explains Mexico license plates; probably less costly to register it there.

It seems like they had just recently moved back to the U.S. after living in Mexico for about 3 years.

I also heard that the beheaded LEO was a warning to not look any further and that the two that supposedly did the shooting have been taken care of by the cartel itself. They certainly don't want any attention from the U.S. in this area and this is just the thing to do that. The thinking is that the shooters got a little ansy and thought the couple may have been scoping out an old church or something heavily used by their cartel. I don't know any more, but the whole thing still sounds pretty fishy.

Cobra Medic wrote:Why did they have Mexican plates on their truck? Maybe they do work for another cartel.

David Hartley worked for an oil and gas company, and he and his wife had recently relocated to McAllen, Texas, from Mexico, where they had lived for approximately two years. According to the Stratfor report, the couple's vehicle still had a license plate from Mexico's Tamaulipas state.

http://www.aolnews.com/crime/article/fa ... 3%7C177748" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This is not the first killing (sniping) along the Rio Grande or one of the bordering lakes.

http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archi ... 989_655948

I was in Marfa when this happened. The current one is for a different reason, but both generally highlight that there is really little to no effective law enforcement along the border on the Mexican side. I advise people going to Mexico to have their life insurance paid up and will in order.

I know quite a few people that think nothing will happen to them just because nothing has. I'm married to one. I think a lot of it is they are not gun enthusiasts and so it's not worth the burden of having to carry one. It's easy for me because I love guns, besides the peace of mind.

I understand that there are people who walk around in condition white, but going to a "remote" location, on the border, via Jetski, through pirate encounter prone waters?

mctowalot wrote:I understand that there are people who walk around in condition white, but going to a "remote" location, on the border, via Jetski, through pirate encounter prone waters?

Have you heard about the Darwin Awards?

boba wrote:

mctowalot wrote:I understand that there are people who walk around in condition white, but going to a "remote" location, on the border, via Jetski, through pirate encounter prone waters?

Have you heard about the Darwin Awards?

As Ron White says, "You can't fix stupid."