Zindell Brown, 28, of Lake City, South Carolina, had more than nerves as she prepared for her first trip outside the United States. Perhaps it was a premonition about the trip that he and several of his friends were going to make to Mexico.
“He said, ‘something doesn’t feel quite right,’” his older sister, Zalandria Brown, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “It was the last thing we talked about.”
Taking a protective stance on the man he was so close to calling his “pelvic bone,” Brown asked his brother not to make the trip earlier this month. Yet as someone known for helping others, Brown wasn’t surprised when her brother put that feeling behind her and offered to drive her group of childhood friends on their road trip to Mexico, where one of them had scheduled cosmetic surgery and another planned to celebrate his 34th birthday.
Brown last saw his younger brother alive inside a white rental van. At some point during the nearly 22-hour drive from South Carolina to Brownsville, Texas, Brown saw a video that Zindell posted smiling for the camera.
But the group was attacked in Mexico. Around noon, a vehicle collided with the van. Several men wearing tactical vests and assault rifles arrived in another vehicle and surrounded them, according to Mexican police reports.
Two members of the group — Zindell Brown and Shaeed Woodard — were shot dead. Eric Williams was shot in the leg and he, along with the other survivor Latavia McGee, were placed in a pickup truck, according to video posted on social media.
The acts are attributed to the Gulf cartel, a drug trafficking organization linked to murders and kidnappings in Matamoros, a city of half a million people that has long been a stronghold of the criminal group. The cartel reportedly apologized for the killings in a letter seen by the AP from a Mexican law enforcement official.
Even before seeing the footage of the ambush that soon circulated online, Zalandria Brown said she began to get a strange feeling that her brother was already gone.
“It was the other part of my soul,” he stressed.
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