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Relatives have identified three bodies found in a well as those of two Australian surfers and one American who went missing last weekend, Mexican authorities said Sunday.
Baja California state prosecutors said the relatives had viewed the corpses recovered from a remote well about 50 feet (15 meters) deep and recognized them as their loved ones.
Thieves apparently killed the three, who were on a surfing trip to Mexico’s Baja peninsula, to steal their truck because they wanted the tires. They then allegedly got rid of the bodies by dumping them in a well near the coast.
The well was located some 4 miles (6 kilometers) from where the foreigners were killed, and also contained a fourth cadaver that had been there much longer.
Three suspects are being held in connection with the case, which locals said was solved far more quickly than the disappearances of thousands of Mexicans.
The three men were on a camping and surfing trip along a stretch of coast south of the city of Ensenada, posting idyllic photos on social media of waves and isolated beaches, before they went missing last weekend.
Chief state prosecutor María Elena Andrade Ramírez described what likely would have been moments of terror that ended the trip for brothers Jake and Callum Robinson from Australia and American Jack Carter Rhoad.
She theorized the killers drove by and saw the foreigners‘ pickup truck and tents and wanted to steal their tires. But „when (the foreigners) came up and caught them, surely, they resisted.“
She said that’s when the killers would have shot the tourists.
The thieves then allegedly went to what she called „a site that is extremely hard to get to“ and allegedly dumped the bodies into a well they apparently were familiar with. She said investigators were not ruling out the possibility the same suspects also dumped the first, earlier body in the well as part of previous crimes.
„They may have been looking for trucks in this area,“ Andrade Ramírez said.
The thieves allegedly covered the well with boards. „It was literally almost impossible to find it,“ Andrade Ramírez said, and it took two hours to winch the bodies out of the well.
