Deadly Matamoros kidnapping calls back to 1989 murder of Mark Kilroy
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The deadly March 3 kidnapping of four people from South Carolina is the kind of case the Brownsville Police Department said is uncommon for the department.
"When we received word from it, it was actually very surprising to all of us because the last case that we actually handled that was documented was the Mark Killroy case," Brownsville police spokesman Martin Sandoval said.
Kilroy was a 21-year-old University of Texas Austin student. Nearly 35 years ago, he came to the Rio Grande Valley for Spring Break.
"[He was a] great guy, would give his shirt off his back. Friendly, excelled well, very athletically and academically," Ryan Fenley said.
Fenley was friends with Kilroy, and he was supposed to come to Valley with him, but he backed out the day before.
On Tuesday, March 14th, 1989, Kilroy, along with a group of friends, walked into Matamoros to visit the bars. It wasn't until the last bar that everything changed.
"My friends started being followed," Fenley said. "Until they were walking back towards the Gateway International Bridge."
Kilroy didn't make it back to the bridge. A major effort was started on both the U.S. and Mexican side of the border to find him.
"But how everything unfolded as you remember the story, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and worse, and we were shaken," Fenley said.
Kilroy's body was found on a ranch along with 14 other bodies.
"They kidnapped him and slaughtered him," Fenley said. "After everything went down, it rocked me to my core. And how could it not...we didn't know that this was even possible. We didn't know that this was even going on."
Fenley said the recent kidnapping in Matamoros brings back memories of Kilroy's death.
"Except [that] time, it wasn't an ordinary cartel, it was a Mexican drug smuggling Satanic cult," Fenley said.
Thirty-four years have passed since Killroy's death. The incident put a border community, and the nation, on edge.
But for residents here, a trip to Mexico can be a way of life.
"It is very common to see hundreds of people crossing the bridge every day to take care of any needs whether to visit family, doctors, dentists, veterinarians," Sandoval said.
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