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A Mexican army infantry captain and three riflemen were charged with intentional homicide stemming from a shooting September 5th near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, say Mexican news accounts.
Originally, reports by the military were that soldiers aboard an army patrol were threatened with aggression and that was the reason why they fired on the car and its occupants.
However, a report release by the Scretaria de al Defence Nacional (SEDENA) now says that there was nothing in the actions of the civilians in the car that would warrant the army opening fire on them.
Army Captain of infantry Cruz Núñez Valdez and three other riflemen who fired on the car that night were charged: Private Antonio Ramirez Perez, Private José Antonio Rosado and Corporal Lucas Hernandez Valerio. All soldiers were with the Mexican 16th Infantry Regiment under the command of General Guillermo Galvan Galvan, and were temporarily quartered in Monterrey.
As a background, there were no reports of unusually large number of gang incidents in or around Monterrey prior or during the events of September 5th, save for a single firefight between a detachment of the Mexican Army on Thursday September 2nd on the Reynosa-Monterrey highway which killed five armed suspects, and wounded a few civilians.
It is unknown if Captain Nunez's detail was involved in the September 2nd firefight.
According to the report, the army unit was returning from patrol for the night southbound on the Nuevo Laredo-Monterrey highway at about 2100 hrs when they were passed by a packed Chevrolet Malibu, which the detail commander, Captain Nunez, observed the driver "had a different attitude to the rest of those who traveled."
Originally, the military reported that the Chevrolet Malibu with dark tinted windows had "run a checkpoint" manned by the army unit, which precipitated the pursuit. Later reports said there was no checkpoint and that the military convoy was moving when the shooting took place.
Apparently at 2101 hrs Captain Nunez then ordered his driver, Lt. Santos Zavala César Ivan, to fall in behind the driver and flash the vehicle's headlamps at the Malibu in a effort to get the driver to slow down and pull over, which instead caused the driver of the car to accelerate and start weaving in and out of traffic.
The action by the driver precipitated a pursuit by the convoy. Three minutes later the driver overtook the Malibu, then Nunez opened fire on the vehicle attempting to shoot out the tires firing two rounds, which was followed by rifle fire from his other three charges: Perez and Hernandez each fired five rounds while Rosado fired ten rounds.
The publicly available versions of the shooting fail to explain what transpired between the time the car crashed at about 2105 hrs and the arrival of the first ambulance at 2132 hrs, except to note that the minor child in the group, Alejandro Gabriel de Leon Castellanos, 15, was out of the vehicle and was apparently bleeding out on the ground before medical aid arrived.
Castellanos' time of death was recorded as 2128 hrs. Castellanos' father died the following day.
All four soldiers were charged with murder because despite making ballistics tests, SEDENA could not assess any differing levels of culpability from the testimony and the evidence at hand, or who fired the shots that killed the two civilians.
The decision is considered unprecedented in Mexico's ongoing war on drugs. A previous similar incident involving the army in Tamaulipas last April in which the military denied culpability in the death of another minor child may have been the motivation for quickly investigating and charging the soldiers responsible in the September 5th incident.
SEDENA's public conflict with the Mexican Human Right Commission is considered in a few circles a public relations disaster for SEDENA.
The Mexican Human Rights Commission report on the incident in Tamaulipas in April, 2010 can be found here (PDF in Spanish).