Mexican authorities arrested a heavily-armed man near the scene where nine members of a Mormon family were massacred Tuesday, and they’re investigating whether he was involved with the killings.
The state prosecutor’s office in the northern Mexico state of Sonora said the man was arrested in Agua Prieta, on the Mexican border with Arizona, with four assault-style weapons, spent magazines, high-caliber ammo, and two people bound and gagged in his car. The region has become increasingly violent as drug cartels have taken hold, and it’s not yet clear that the man had anything to do with the massacre.
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The police didn’t say who was bound in the man’s vehicle.
A three-car convoy of SUVs carrying members of an extended Mormon family was ambushed Monday as they made their way between La Mora and Colonia LeBarón, an enclave of the Mormon sect that cut ties with the Church of Latter-Day Saints in the 1950s to make their lives along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Nine people are dead — three women and six children, all U.S. citizens. One of the vehicles was shot so many times that its gas tank exploded, and four of the children were burned beyond recognition. Near the other two vehicles, ambushed about 10 miles down the road from the first car, cops recovered some 200 shell casings.
READ: What we know about the Mormon family massacred in Mexico
Among the dead were eight-month-old twins. Several others remained hospitalized on Wednesday morning, according to CBS News. One 13-year-old boy walked about 14 miles to get help, according to CNN.
Two days after the attack, there’s still no clear motive. It’s possible the family was deliberately targeted, or that they were mistaken for a rival drug cartel.
Relatives of the family told the New York Times that the cartels warned them to stay off that road at night, which they did. But authorities as of Wednesday haven’t been able to explain why they fell victim to such a brutal attack.
“We’ve been traveling that road for 50 years,” David Langford, a relative of the victims, told the Times.
If the family was targeted by the cartels, it wouldn’t be the first time. The cartels murdered two members of the LeBarón family in 2009 after the Mormons began to organize against the drug traffickers.
The threats to the family reportedly led the Mexican government to beef up police presence around their compound, according to CNN. There were, at a time, 90 Mexican federales charged with protecting the Mormons. But some of that protection may have been withdrawn when the new government, led by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, came to power last year.
Cover: A sign announces the entry to Colonia LeBaron, one of many locations where the extended LeBaron family lives in the Galeana municipality of Chihuahua state, Mexico, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez)
