2 U.S. High School Students Fatally Shot in Mexico

Juan
Carlos Echeverri, left, was a high school student studying in Ciudad
Juarez. Carlos Mario Gonzalez, right, was a a sophomore at Cathedral
High School in El Paso. The third teenager, not pictured, was
identified as Cesar Yalin Miramontes Jimenez (AP).

Three teenage boys were shot to death in the Mexican border city of
Ciudad Juarez over the weekend, at least two of them U.S. citizens and
high school students in Texas, authorities said.

The boys were killed at 4:22 p.m. Saturday while looking at cars in a
dealership in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas, Chihuahua
prosecutors' spokesman Arturo Sandoval said. One was found inside a
white Jeep Cherokee and the other two in the courtyard.

There were no leads on suspects or a motive, Sandoval said. Two
managers were also in the dealership during the attack. One refused to
give a statement, while the statement from the other manager was not
released because of the pending investigation, Sandoval added. At least
60 bullet casings were found at the scene.

One of the boys, Carlos Mario Gonzalez Bermudez, 16, was a sophomore at
Cathedral High School in El Paso, said Nick Gonzalez, the Roman
Catholic brother who is the principal. Another victim, Juan Carlos
Echeverri, 15, had been a freshman at the private all-boys Catholic
school last year, but left to study in Ciudad Juarez, Gonzalez said.

"They were very normal boys," Gonzalez said Tuesday in an interview with Fox News.
Gonzalez confirmed that both Bermudez and Echeverri were U.S. citizens.
The nationality of the third victim, 17-year-old Cesar Yalin Miramontes
Jimenez, was unclear.

A friend of two of the three teens said the pair had crossed the border from Texas for a party and then stayed to buy a car.

The school principal said Gonzalez Bermudez mainly lived in Ciudad
Juarez and commuted each day across the border. He said 20 percent of
the 485 students enrolled at Cathedral are from Ciudad Juarez.

Gonzalez said the school's sophomore class had a prayer service Monday
and officials planned a rosary service for the entire school later in
the week.

"It's a lot of pain, a lot of sorrow, a lot of tears, a lot of coming
together as a community to try to hold each other up and to try and
make sense today," Gonzalez said. "How do you make sense of this
meaningless tragedy?"

Gonzalez continued: "Hopefully this can really empower us to make a
positive change in the border community because their deaths will have
no meaning otherwise."

Many Ciudad Juarez residents travel across the border on a daily basis
for work or study. Some Mexicans live in El Paso for safety reasons and
commute to Ciudad Juarez.

Ciudad Juarez city has become one of the world's most dangerous cities
amid a fierce turf war between the rival Sinaloa and Juarez drug
cartels. More than 3,000 people were killed last year in the city of
1.3 million residents.

Gonzalez said students at the school have had a number of relatives
killed in the violence in Ciudad Juarez. A graduate of the school was
killed last fall, he said.

"Our Juarez kids knew all three" of the teenagers killed over the
weekend, he said. "It's a very tight knit community. A lot of them car
pool; that's how they know each other."

The three teenagers were killed in one of three triple homicides in Ciudad Juarez over the weekend, the El Paso Times reports.

A teenager, a woman, and a 40-year-old man were killed in a separate
shooting attack, according to the newspaper, and another triple
homicide left a 13-year-old boy dead

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/02/07/teens-killed-mexico-high-schoolers/#ixzz1DPERlP32

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