drug cartel

One of the two survivors of a deadly abduction last month in Mexico says she watched the video of the drug cartel shootout that killed two of her close friends from one of her kidnappers' phones. "I just started crying," Latavia McGee says of her reaction to the video. "I was like, 'I'm never going home.'" The interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper reveals grisly details of McGee's and Eric Williams' days held captive in a remote region of the Gulf Coast. At one point the two friends say the cartel tried to make them have sex. Williams, who had been shot in the left leg, says someone stitched his wound on a two-by-four.

One of the two Americans gunned down three weeks ago by a Mexican cartel is being remembered as a sweet man who hoped to celebrate his birthday with a journey over the border. Over 100 people attended a Saturday funeral for Shaeed Woodard, whose was slain just days before he turned 34 during a tightknit friend group's road trip. Since then, an attorney for the Woodards says the family has received an outpouring of support.

The sister of an American killed in an attack in Mexico says that she and he both had a bad feeling about the trip. Zalandria Brown tells The Associated Press over the phone that her brother Zindell Brown was worried about taking his first trip outside the country. He went down with a group of friends including one woman who was treating herself to cosmetic surgery and another who was celebrating his 34th birthday. She says her brother was extremely close to her.

It was supposed to be a fun road trip to Mexico for a group of childhood friends. But once they got there, the trip took a terrible turn, and two members of the group would never make it home. Shortly after Latavia McGee and her friends crossed the border and drove into Matamoros, their van was crashed into and they came under gunfire by Gulf cartel members. McGee and Eric Williams, who were loaded into a pickup truck by their captors, would be held for three days next to the bodies of their two slain friends.

The anonymous tip that led Mexican authorities to a remote shack where four abducted Americans were held described armed men, people wearing blindfolds and plenty of activity around a ranch. Mexican investigative documents viewed Friday by The Associated Press describe how authorities headed for the rural area east of Matamoros on Tuesday morning, leaving the highway and driving remote dirt roads looking for the described location.

A letter claiming to be from the Mexican drug cartel blamed for abducting four Americans and killing two of them condemns the violence and says the gang turned its own members who were responsible over to authorities. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press through a Tamaulipas state law enforcement official, the Scorpions faction of the Gulf cartel apologized to the residents of Matamoros where the Americans were kidnapped, the Mexican woman who died in the cartel shootout and the four Americans and their families.