Two San Diego teenagers who took a Black Friday trip to Mexico were shot and killed execution-style in a triple homicide Sunday morning at a Tijuana apartment complex.
As the San Diego Union-Tribune reports, the victims were Christopher Alexis Gomez, 17, a football player in his senior year at O’Farrell Charter High School in San Diego’s Encanto neighborhood. and Juan Suarez-Ojeda, who graduated from Encanto’s Ingenuity Charter School earlier this year.
The third victim was an 18-year-old Tijuana man, Gomez’s cousin Katheryn Garcia told the Union-Tribune. According to the Union-Tribune, the trio had gone to a barbecue in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, on Friday and were supposed to return that night.
A Tijuana police detective told Gomez’s family the three teens were tortured before they were shot Sunday, Garcia told the Union-Tribune.
According to Tijuana media reports and relayed by the Union-Tribune, the deadly gunfire erupted around 5 a.m. Sunday at a housing complex in south-central Tijuana. When police arrived, they found three young men dressed only in their underwear strewn in front of an apartment door.
According to Tijuana news site Punto Norte, an initial investigation suggested a group of armed men had moved the three teens at gunpoint, made them kneel and shot them each in the head execution-style,
Garcia told the Union-Tribune that Gomez recently got his first job cleaning cars at a parking lot near the San Diego International Airport and was planning to graduate from O’Farrell Charter next year before joining the Marines.
“We’re all in disbelief that this happened,” Garcia said through tears to the Union-Tribune. “This was his first time going over to Tijuana or Ensenada.”
“It’s been pretty devastating for students and staff,” O’Farrell Charter Superintendent Jonathan Dean told the Union-Tribune Wednesday night. “It’s a tough situation.”
The high school’s senior class of about 135 students was planning to create a memorial Thursday.
The superintendent called Gomez a “really nice, good kid” who was a leader during this, the football team’s inaugural season.
According to the Union-Tribune, O’Farrell Charter faculty set up a GoFundMe site for both San Diego families, and Garcia also set up a GoFundMe to help her cousin’s family, who she said was struggling financially to bring his body back to San Diego.