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Mexican Suspect: Killing Targeted US Guard's Car
 Olivia Torres - Associated Press
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March 30, 2010
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico — A suspect in the killing of three people linked to the U.S. consulate says his gang was hunting for the vehilce of a Texas jail guard who was slain in one of the two white SUVs attacked, Mexican authorities said Tuesday.
The purported confession appears to suggest that El Paso jail officer Arthur H. Redelfs was targeted in the March 13 shootings in Ciudad Juarez that also killed his wife, Lesley A. Enriquez, an employee of the U.S. consulate in this border city. The husband of another consulate worker was killed in the other vehicle attacked.
A statement by the joint army, federal and state anti-crime task force in Chihuahua state said suspect Ricardo Valles de la Rosa confessed to acting as a lookout in the shootings. It said he had been imprisoned in the United States and deported in 2007, after which he took up with the Barrio Azteca gang.
According to the statement:
An Azteca gang leader "ordered him by telephone some days before to locate the white sport utility vehicle in which Arthur Hancock Redelfs was traveling, which he did on March 13 at a children's' party facility."
Valles de la Rosa told investigators that "when the sport utility vehicle left that spot, he advised other colleagues in the Aztecas, who ordered him to follow it."
By the time Redelfs' white SUV reached the scene where the attack occurred, Valles de la Rosa was told to back off, because the Aztecas - as the gang is known in Mexico - had the vehicle located. He said that moments later he heard gunfire, and saw the bullet-ridden vehicle with a dead man and woman inside.
The couple's 7-month-old daughter was later found wailing in the back of the vehicle.
The statement did not specify whether Redelfs' job at the jail in El Paso, across the border from Juarez, was the reason he was followed and shot. One theory was that the Aztecas - whose members operate and are incarcerated on both sides of the border - could have sought revenge against Redelfs for events inside the jail.
Other theories had suggested the killings might have been a case of mistaken identity.
"The information the suspect has given is still being verified, so that authorities are not releasing other information on other probable participants in the double shootings and their probable motive," the statement said.
Still, the statement appeared to strengthen the hypothesis that the third victim in the shootings - Jorge Alberto Salcido, the husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate - may have been killed because he left the same party in a white SUV similar to the one in which Redelfs and his wife died.
The statement said federal prosecutors were taking over the case and were expected to charge Valles de la Rosa with the murder of a rival gang member.
Earlier, Mexican officials said six people were found slain Tuesday in the central state of Morelos, including four who were decapitated.
State prosecutors said the four mutilated bodies were found along a road from Mexico City to Acapulco. A note left at the scene threatened alleged drug trafficker Edgar Valdez Villareal, who authorities say is battling Hector Beltran Leyva for control of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
A prosecutors' statement said the other victims were two brothers found shot to death inside an apartment in the town of Ahuatepec, north of Cuernavaca, which is near the capital.
Drug violence has claimed more than 17,900 lives across Mexico since December 2006.
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