Tiffany Young-Hartley: According to Stratfor, the Los Zetas drug cartel destroyed her husband's body the same day they murdered him.[Previously, at WEJB/NSU:
“David Hartley: Mexican Drug Cartel Murder of American Jet-Skiing with Wife May All Have been a Mere ‘Misunderstanding.’”]
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
Purely coincidentally, Mexican law enforcement also charged Martínez Escobedo with murdering and beheading police commander Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, who had just been assigned to investigate the Hartley murder.
A Mexican police official, Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, the police commander of Miguel Alemán State, investigated the matter. Commander Flores’ severed head was delivered in a suitcase to the “Mexican military’s Eight Zone headquarters in Reynosa on Oct. 12.”
I could find only Spanish-language reports, and only a few of them, on this case from the previous year.
Hartley widow says Zeta arrest brings vindication
By Lynn Brezosky : October 9, 2012 : Updated: October 10, 2012 1:04 a.m.
San Antonio Express-News
MCALLEN,Tx.,Oct.07,2010- Tiffany Hartley,29 wife of David,30, who was shot while jet sking [sic] on Falcon Lake during a studio interview n McAllen, Texas, Oct.7,2010. [Caption to SAEN photo.]
BROWNSVILLE — For Tiffany Hartley, the Mexican government's arrest of a high-ranking cartel operative brought long-awaited vindication.
It was the first time Mexican officials acknowledged that her husband, David, was killed by cartel operatives.
“They've never acknowledged that in two years, and for them to finally acknowledge that David was murdered in Mexico by the cartels, by the Zetas cartel, for me is huge,” she said Tuesday.
Hartley, who now lives in Colorado, said the announcement should satisfy her critics: “The people who thought I had something to do with it can finally go, ‘But Mexico's admitting that they had something to do with it.'”
Mexican officials reported Monday that military forces captured Salvador Alfonso Martínez Escobedo, 31, a high-ranking Zetas gang member accused of having a leading role in a series of horrific crimes.
The charges against him include mass murders and the slaying of both David Hartley in 2010 and the police commander investigating Hartley's death, whose severed head later was delivered to Mexican military in a suitcase.
David Hartley's body never was recovered.
By the time of his arrest Saturday in Nuevo Laredo, Martínez, also known as “the Squirrel,” had a $1 million bounty on his head.
Tiffany Hartley's story that gunmen killed her husband Sept. 30, 2010, as the two vacationed on Falcon Lake drew international attention to the drug war raging on the Texas border.
Her tale also drew skepticism, as pundits and criminal experts searched her account for discrepancies and analyzed her body language for signs of dishonesty.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said early that “speculation is unwarranted” toward Tiffany Hartley.
Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez said he was frustrated by the way the Mexican government treated her.
“She wasn't interviewed but rather interrogated,” he said.
David Hartley had been working for an oil field services company in Reynosa, Mexico, and the couple were preparing to return to their native Colorado that fall.
They spent one of their last days along the Texas border sightseeing. One of the sights they wanted to see was a partly submerged church on the Mexican side of the lake.
Some months earlier, officials received reports of armed “pirates” on the lake, robbing U.S. fishermen at gunpoint.
Sheriff Gonzalez said Tuesday that Tiffany's story was, from the beginning, consistent with those reports.
He said his own investigation into the death turned up five names of suspected low-ranking cartel members. While the names did not include Martinez's, he said Martinez was likely arrested as the ring leader.
“I'm sure that the Mexican military is not going to lie about this thing,” Gonzalez said. “I'm sure he was involved somehow, though not the actual killing of Hartley himself.”
Mexican officials naming Hartley as a murder victim is “very important,” he said.
Tiffany Hartley said she still wants more information to make sure the government has arrested the man responsible for her husband's death.
“But, you know, either way, he's a cartel member, either way he's part of the Zetas cartel,” she said. “He has hurt a lot of people and killed a lot of people.”
lbrezosky@express-news.net
This lake as I understand it is right on the border. So if are on a boat, jet ski, what ever, you can travel the length and breadth of the lake and as long as you do not touch land the customs, immigration, border control does not care. You are on the water no matter where you are and is legal. Once you touch land on either side then it is a different matter. This couple was not doing anything illegal.
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