When two Australian brothers drove down to Mexico’s northwest coast from San Diego last week with their American friend, they were looking to catch the crisp waves that make Baja California a popular destination among travelers from across the world.
But soon after arriving to the Mexican city of Ensenada, Callum Robinson’s Instagram posts of his surf adventure ceased. The group stopped answering calls and texts.
He and his brother Jake never showed up at an Airbnb they had booked, their mother said in a social media post, pleading for help from anyone who had seen her two sons.
On Sunday, Mexican authorities announced that the bodies of the three tourists, found at the bottom of a well with gunshot wounds to their heads, had been identified by their families.
The men had been killed in a carjacking gone wrong, the authorities said, and suspects had been detained within days of the men’s disappearance. More people are being investigated.
It was a tragic yet somewhat fast resolution to a case that had drawn international attention.
For many local Mexicans, however, the quick response from the authorities to locate the Robinson siblings and Jack Carter Rhoad, the American, and make arrests seemed to be an exception in a country where tens of thousands of missing-person cases have sat for years without ever being solved.
